The Singles Jukebox

It’s only natural…

[Video][Website]
[4.42]

Thomas Inskeep: England just keeps cranking out these wannabe Ed Sheerans, doesn’t it?
[2]

Alfred Soto: Gospel-inflected house is one of the delights of the Western world when the beats are strong and a shouting white man is nowhere to be seen.
[3]

Scott Mildenhall: The greatest, most accurate description of Tom Odell remains one by Doug Robertson, on this site three years ago. The short and tall of it: Tom Odell spends his whole life yearning. At the very least, he’s been doing it for four years now. Ghostly howling, allusions to nature and a load of banging a piano to underpin a load of shouting about his hopeless, unrequited love are exactly what he was doing then, and they’re exactly what he’s doing today. This is Tom Odell’s life. Being a human Starsailor has its benefits, however. Piano banging and unrequited love are useful transferable skills in pop. With a good enough grasp of them, you can find yourself here, at the vanguard of PDM — polite dance music.
[7]

Katie Gill: Man, I really want to hate Tom Odell. I always prejudge skinny white British singers with stupid hair. But that chorus is actually annoyingly good. It’s like someone took a Bastille song and made it a club mix. It’s a good thing his lyrics are cheesy and the verses forgettable, otherwise I’d have to accept that I really like this song.
[7]

Tim de Reuse: The line “Wish I had a little more than nature in me” works with a wry, self-deprecatory smirk; the line “I wish she had a little pheromones for me” pushes it a little too far. The whiny lament of the verses almost succeeds in a kitschy woe-is-me-times-a-zillion kind of way; the EDM risers and shiny, galloping piano lines are tonally bat-shit bizzare.
[3]

Brad Shoup: An odd fusion of nightsweat indie and dance-pop rise: the piano strikes some compromise between barrelhouse and regular house. I suppose if Muse isn’t going this route someone should.
[5]

Iain Mew: This positively caught my attention on the radio — I can’t think of anything else that has gone for the same blend of forlorn early Coldplay songwriting and gentle late Coldplay dance-pop. It doesn’t stand up well to closer listening because that reveals that Odell going past mere self-pity to pleading with nature that having a crush is not right is ridiculous at best, and setting it to sounds so buoyant just makes it more obvious.
[4]

Josh Langhoff: Forget Mother Nature — Tom Odell has a little motherfucker in him, one that drives him to stalk the land, waking sleeping lovers to tell them their love won’t last because SCIENCE! He don’t know much about botany, don’t know much ornithology, and everything he knows about magnets he probably learned from Insane Clown Posse and/or “The Main Attraction” episode of Amazing Stories. But that’s OK — I don’t know much about unreliable narration, but I often use it to bail out songs like this one, where the music soars to Keane-level burnished-tenor heartache even as the singer keeps babbling about pheromones.
[7]

Hannah Jocelyn: Like almost everything Tom Odell’s released up until now, “Magnitised” is wildly overdone, with reverberating, hyper-compressed harmonies up the goddamn wazoo. That apparently nobody in the studio could agree on exactly what this should be is almost amusing at parts, especially in the second verse, where that Parachutes melody clashes with Ceremonials/Night Visions/“Pompeii” drums. Yet there’s something compelling here, even with the hackneyed metaphors, even with the “flower in the snow” line, even with the “pheromones” line, in the weird blend of disco with classic singer-songwriter pop. This indecisiveness could be a weakness, but it instead becomes a strength, especially in the build to the chorus. The eventual release, where the instrumental and Odell’s hysterical performance hit with the force of multiple genres, makes the perilous road to get there nearly worth it.
[7]

William John: The message to Odell after hearing this ought to be to encourage the maintenance of whatever it is he’s doing with his (great) hair, but that if he really wants to clamber out of his fuckboi rut, he’ll need to ease off on the howling and the stilted vocal cadences. The latter may be observed most acutely in the bridge, where he gets stuck on one ugly note and then opts to elongate the last word of each line, when adding a few more would fit far more naturally with the backing rhythm. It’s quite the trick to make something so underwritten seem so laboured, and the avalanche of house piano that follows is entirely unmerited.
[2]

Cassy Gress: Chunky piano? Yay! Use of tom drums for color? Yay! The way he just kind of wavers and wheedles this out of his upper range with a nearly-audible runny nose? Oh dear.
[3]

Jonathan Bogart: Having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that we have now reached the third generation of Coldplay clones. The music video being essentially a car advert feels more honest than anything in the song.
[3]