Xenia – Sing You Home
Doctors say she’s the illest, ’cause she’s suffering from realness…
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[5.36]
Katherine St Asaph: The Voice is better than American Idol because it seems to work in reverse. On the show, Xenia was voiceless elimination fodder who was routinely swallowed up by the freaking Script and coddled like a toddler by coach Blake Shelton. Off the show, boosted by studio shadows and piano stalk, she’s compelling. Shame it sheds its “My Moon My Man” halfway through for Sara Bareilling, but everyone loses nerve sometimes.
[6]
Frank Kogan: Xenia was astonishingly impressive on The Voice, a short, hopeful girl with a voice as light as her body, deftly inserting the sound of a ravaged spirit into light middlebrow pop. The problem with “Sing You Home” is that its chorus tries to impose something big on her that it has no right to. Hers is a voice that doesn’t need transcendence, is fine in its own intelligence and feeling, has no need to call down the heavens. Doesn’t need the drums and piano pounding so hard either, though they don’t get in the way too badly, as the soft little rip in her throat does its gentle, heart-rending work. And she glides down nicely out of the chorus, not smacking us down with emotion. She’s beautiful here, but the song basically should’ve shut up.
[7]
Michaela Drapes: It’s hard to give a “thanks for showing up” kind of score to a performer who certainly has a lot of potential and a charming personality. Thing is, this song does absolutely nothing to showcase any qualities she has behind her voice, which quite honestly sounds like it belongs to someone else. Xenia is wonderful at parroting what’s in vogue currently; what will be interesting to see is if she can mature as a performer and really be someone worth listening to.
[4]
Sabina Tang: Someone is evidently trying so hard to unearth The Next Adele(tm) that it becomes worrisomely difficult to discern song or singer as entities in their own right.
[4]
Edward Okulicz: The songwriter wanted it to be Adele, but whoever produced (assuming they’re not the same person) keeps mischievously flipping the switch to The Supremes — that soft and polite but insistent bounce is something none of Adele’s big hits have ever approached. Xenia actually wears both the soulfulness and the relative cheerfulness of the song very well; if the climactic way the chorus is sung actually sounds nowhere near as huge and affirming as it’s meant to be, at least its modesty suits the music and doesn’t overpower it.
[7]
Alfred Soto: This exists because Xenia knows about “market shares” and “Adele.” But she’s no clone: pitched between a sarcasm that she no doubt thinks is beneath her and an amorphous pining for a usable past, Xenia is her own cipher.
[5]
Iain Mew: “Sing You Home” does sometimes have a feel of “Rolling in the Deep” as recreated by someone who has not actually heard “Rolling in the Deep” but has had it described to them very well. Its chorus, though, is a very different thing, climbing down from the song’s escalating scale to put across a gentle hope in letting things go and believing that you will find a positive way through.
[6]
Anthony Easton: Classic backup singers, with their classic syllables, merge into a chorus that might as well be Motown, even how it quotes Stepping Stone. Not nearly as much of a vocal work out as I was hoping for, but the piano almost makes up for it. In the Adele/Winehouse nostalgia for the sake of nostalgia crowd, but it’s not something I can dismiss in its entirety.
[7]
Jonathan Bogart: Young lady’s got some nice smoky phrasing down pat. Now she just has to a) learn to apply it judiciously to a good set of lyrics, and b) find a good set of lyrics. Duffy castoffs don’t count.
[5]
Brad Shoup: Even the bells sound tepid.
[3]
John Seroff: If Adam Levine and Meatloaf starred in an ABC sitcom about a pair of washed-up rockers who managed to get a residency at a local club by crossdressing as a girl band and WACKY HIJINX ENSUED, “Sing You Home” would make excellent theme music: swinging, upbeat, hopeful, rote. You’d likely need to clip that slack piano bass line and pitch everything up from fall to spring but that’s where the song ends up anyway, so where’s the harm?
[5]