As Rick Nelson said, you can’t please everybody, so you’ve just got to moderately satisfy the Jukebox…

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Brad Shoup: This may be a total blasé rock-crit comparison, but this sounds a but like the King of Limbs people thought they wanted but would fucking flip out if they got it. The intersection of synthesized and over-processed vocals makes this an experience akin to stepping out right after the rain: the mugginess chokes. The bass is stepping jazzy on the refrain, Mvula’s pleased to work in her lower register, and I can deal with the music box but it’s only been ten spins. A ripping sound, just not one for the garden party.
[7]

Alfred Soto: I haven’t responded to music boxes since Vespertine, but this British top ten offers other delights: handclaps, bass pokes, and a singer who can undercut the feeling in her Lauryn Hill voice with electronic treatments and reserve her Mary J. Blige voice for one-sentence refrains. There isn’t much here beyond a showcase but it’s impressive.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Laura Mvula does Laura Barrett? The processed vocals and love-silly lyrics suggest a 20/20 Experience I don’t hate. But hatred would stick longer.
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Jonathan Bradley: Mvula’s tones are rich enough to knock off-kilter what initially sets out to be a rather uninspired exercise in soul indie — the layers of Auto-Tuned backing vocals help here too — but the too-precious combination of chimes and handclaps has me expecting a voice-over detailing the many benefits of signing up for such-and-such a company’s exciting new 4G mobile phone network.
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Anthony Easton: The twinkling works well with the handclaps, and her voice is rough enough to make the stories of her domesticity sound more interesting than they are. 
[5]

Iain Mew: Laura Mvula’s album is delightfully odd. The brass arrangements at times remind me of These New Puritans’ dour unreality, although the vocals are very different. “Green Garden” is a representative choice of single, working in something like a pop structure but refusing to develop any forward motion in the expected way before going in sudden surges. The most ear-catching and enjoyable thing about it is the way that its organic lyrical imagery of gardens and butterflies contrasts with the artificial backing vocals. When Mvula puts the good times in the past (“like we used to”) it is as if she can’t quite reach back to recreate them properly now.
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Scott Mildenhall: Apparently, Laura began writing songs on her laptop while working as a secondary school supply teacher, presumably in between ducking from all the pencils and pens being thrown at her head. Every supply teacher has to find some way of completely ignoring their class, after all, and were she writing this unselfconscious jaunt at the time she would have had absolutely no problem in transferring her mind to a happier place. The way the hook, “I’ll go wherever you go”, comes to be delivered full-voiced, totally sincere yet totally carefree hits the buttons bang on, comparable to Neil Tennant’s striking declaration that “I’m in love with you, I mean what I say” in Pet Shop Boys’ “Heart”, arrestingly straightforward. To think, her pupils probably thought she was making Mvula herself.
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