It’s the middle of summer, which means the Jukebox is tough to please…

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[6.00]

Will Adams: This is gorgeous and seems to be engineered to hit all of my pleasure centers at once. Beautiful vocals that sound like they’re being sung from the Grand Canyon, deep tom-toms that cascade over each other, and melancholic pads that burn softly but with a hint of urgency: it’s all right up my alley. So why the low score? Because once you’ve heard Minnie Riperton’s original, you realize how inappropriately mopey and sexless this is. This is a song that features the line, “Will you come inside me?”, yet Delilah makes the invitation as unappealing as possible, as if using reverse psychology to push you away. And this is from the same artist responsible for “Go”, an obvious [10] that nailed the icy intimacy that “Inside My Love” misses entirely.
[4]

Iain Mew: Oh, so that’s what the Jean Jaques Smoothie sample was. In her cover Delilah builds the same extraordinary musical tension as in “Go”, but this time the problem is too much payoff rather than too little. If “will you come inside me” ever had an ambiguity of meaning, she doesn’t sing it that way, and nothing else quite keeps up.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: Delilah, you’re really obvious; whitewashing a Minnie Riperton song but straining your vocals more, adding unneeded emphasis to that “come inside me” line — ooh! double meanings! — and doing all this while being stage-named Delilah. I fully expect her next track to be a cover of “Love to Love You Baby” that goes to 23. (ADDENDUM: I swear, I wrote that before looking up her album, on which there’s a song called “Shades of Grey.” Year of recording be damned: I retire.)
[5]

Jer Fairall: I’m impressed with the willingness of so many of today’s budding divas to embrace nuance and atmosphere in their music, but there is a point at which this reserve can become chilly and even oppressive. Proof positive is that the phrases “we should be inside each other” and “will you come inside me” have rarely sounded this asexual.
[5]

Anthony Easton: I cannot determine if the asking to come inside her is a double entendre, or a bad attempt at translating the English. I am not sure if this would change my opinion of the song, which seems just a teensy bit overwrought. 
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: She remains the most thoughtful user of silence in pop; but the thing I most appreciate about “Inside My Love” is that no double entendre is necessary: it’s a song explicitly about, and redolent of, penetrative ecstasy.
[8]

Brad Shoup: The deceptive sweetness of Riperton swapped for something a bit more detached. If you’re sold on the lyric, though, this could probably set your apartment on fire. (And even if not, there’s the strutwork on the toms.) But surely most of us like shouldering a bit of the responsibility?
[7]

Ramzi Awn: Like a horn blast in the middle of the night, Delilah opens “Inside My Love” with the alarm of desperation.  She is all over the place, but the wash of the chorus suits her.  Not to mention those high notes.  But as far as editing goes, the song is a mess; the Bjorkian sprawl doesn’t fully fit, and the range of punch-packing influences doesn’t paint a whole picture.   A lot of beautiful moments, but the honesty in Delilah’s delivery isn’t quite enough to string them together.        
[5]

Sabina Tang: “Breathe” was a coolly soulful slice of Brit songstress neo-trip-hop, but the extra minimalism here parses like… goa trance?… stripped of cheese and flimflam, voice barely clad in offbeat toms and the occasional quavering synthetic siren. As midnight love jams go, I may prefer it by a hair. 
[8]

Patrick St. Michel: Listening to this makes me feel uncomfortable.  I’ve tried playing this from speakers and during walks around my neighborhood, but every time I feel like I’m happening across a hotel-room door left slightly ajar, inadvertently eavesdropping on an intense conversation.  Yet I can’t stop listening to it.  Minnie Riperton’s original version of “Inside My Love” is a gorgeous slow dance of a song, but Delilah transforms it into an intimate stare down.  The little touches in the production bring to mind the subtle facial cues of desire, a quick glance or smile.  The drums that enter add force, but never turn the song into something bigger than the bedroom.  In the wrong hands, this could have turned into awkward foreplay, a line like “you can see inside me/will you come inside me” being enough to close the door.  Delilah, though, makes it all sound so important, the Bjork-ish way she can raise and lower her voice while always sounding right next to your ear.  It feels so wrong to listen to this so much.  
[9]