READER MINI-CONTEST! Who does this guy look naggingly like? (Your editor says Dante, but that’s not quite it…)

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[4.33]

Doug Robertson: Tom Odell is yet another of the seemingly endless conveyor belt of young men who spend their entire lives yearning. He goes for a walk, he yearns. He stands in a supermarket queue clutching a four-pack of yogurt and a money-off coupon, and you know he’s not wasting a moment of this potential yearning time. And when he’s alone in his bedroom, which he invariably is, you can bet every unit of currency you’ve ever possessed that he’s in the middle of a long-term yearning project that is going to last well past lunchtime and will probably overlap with a spot of yearning he’d planned on fitting in around that day’s episode of Countdown. There’s a brief moment of build towards the end of the track that hints at some possible excitement and something beyond the self-indulgent fugg, but no, the yearning promptly returns.
[3]

Edward Okulicz: Odell hasn’t realised that a good long yearn is a slow burn, not a slow churn; if you sound so broken up about everything, you don’t ever build to an emotional climax, or indeed any climax, you just mope. Shame, really, as his voice isn’t at all bad and he makes a decent stab at a bed-wetting Coldplay sort of thing. The sound is there, the craft about halfway so.
[5]

Alfred Soto: He can’t pretend? That’s the problem.
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John Seroff: The roiling build of the eight chord progression to nowhere that takes up much of “Can’t Pretend” is enticing, but by the time the song finally crescendos up to a similarly claustrophobic bridge, the whole thing is outed as little more than a milk-soaked dirge of cliches. The ideas aren’t pushed far enough, the artistry is choked both vocally and instrumentally, and the drama feels forced and stuffy. Please try to not pretend harder.
[4]

Brad Shoup: Jeff Buckley was a Very Bad Thing for music. Odell pays the master tribute by braying without feels over some wailin’ OK Computer-indebted nonsense. Credit him with this: he changes gear with a Gavin DeGraw-type blue-eyed piano breakdown, the backing vocals shadowing him on some eerily inspirational intervals. It’s a much better use of everyone’s time.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: If you must try for pretense-free authenticity, you might as well go big: sneak some electric guitar amid the piano chime (check) put some craw into your cries (check) arrange your choirs (yup) like a riff. It could even trick a skeptic into liking it.
[7]

Iain Mew: Not sure that sounding like the new Morning Runner really ought to be the way to success in 2012, but I can’t pretend that the song does nothing for me. Even if the best bits are ripped off from Elbow’s “Grounds for Divorce”.
[6]

Jer Fairall: Oh good, another achingly sensitive, ponderously melodramatic Brit.
[3]

Patrick St. Michel: Take a little Chris Martin, mix with the vocal stylings of Adele and remove anything from the structure of the song besides a steady build to a predictably bombastic climax.  You now have “Can’t Pretend.”   
[4]

Ian Mathers: Not so much “the male Adele” as the second coming of that guy from Starsailor, surely?
[3]

Hazel Robinson: At first his voice made me really angry, then I enjoyed the piano crescendo, then I liked what a tremulous idiot he sounded, then I really enjoyed the “my arms are tough/but they can be bent” and “I wanna fight/but I can’t contend” lines and it all built in to such a very, very pleasing thrum. Then there was a jaunty breakdown and I thought I should perhaps become angry again, but it seemed so charming that it simply became more and more appealing to me. Worth it.
[8]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: This is a song. Here is some wordless howling. Here are some choir back-ups. Here is a middle-eight. Here is the dictionary definition of the word “funereal.” I have said everything of interest regarding “Can’t Pretend.”
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