Tim: Starts out as a quiet and potentially dreary piano ballad; come the chorus, well…
Tom: Well, that’s been put together by someone who knows how to produce a chorus.
Tim: So that’s a decent song: I was plenty impressed when the chorus happened, the instrumental underneath all sounds great, and although that ending doesn’t really scream 2020, the sound of it is great. There’s one big flaw in it for me, though, which is that it feels way, way too long.
It isn’t, really, but I looked at the clock when the instrumental began and was very surprised I wasn’t yet three minutes in.
Tom: Yep. I was all geared up for that to be headed to the final chorus, only to find that the track’s only half way through.
Tim: Two reasons, as far as I can tell: one is that it’s got almost a full minute of instrumental fade-out; wouldn’t normally be a problem, particularly when it sounds as good as it genuinely does.
Tom: Yep: even if that pair of yelping synth notes start to grate after a while. Repeat to fade is a brave choice in 2020, but honestly, I think it does work here.
Tim: But then there’s the second problem. The main notes are all two beats long, and it just feels dragged out, almost literally at the end, as if someone had fed it into Logic and just stretched it out to half speed. It’s annoying, particularly because I could probably easily live with either one of those two: finish it after that last chorus, fine. Stick in an extra drum beat on the second and fourth notes, fine. But together? Agh, just can’t quite get it.