fka-twigs-good-to-love-singles-going-steady

FKA twigs – “Good to Love” (Singles Going Steady)

With characteristically airy, nerve and neuroses-plagued vocals, FKA twigs confirms that love can be real, important, and "good" even.

Chris Ingalls: Sometimes the best way to move forward is to take a few steps back. FKA Twigs’ latest single largely bypasses the oddball twitchy stylings she’s known for, in favor of a lush, gorgeous, mostly stripped-down ballad. Her unique voice manages to fuse an earthy R&B sensibility with a Kate Bush vulnerability. While the arrangement is somewhat simple, there are (thankfully) plenty of odd touches — sonic blips, soaring spacey synth whooshes — as if Björk dropped by mid-session. There’s really nothing I dislike about this. [10/10]

Chad Miller: “Good to Love” is a nice introduction into new FKA twigs’ music. While it may not sound like twig’s typical offerings, it’s a gorgeous ballad nonetheless. She’s brilliant at building a track from the ground up, reveling in every swell and the return. The amazing production over what sounds like an organ near the three-minute mark is a gorgeous bridge to the end. You almost wish she’d fade the track out there, but she spices the final chorus up to give the track one final push. [8/10]

Emmanuel Elone: Beautiful vocals and gorgeous piano. “Good to Love” is a simple song that excels in showcasing FKA twigs’ strengths. It’s a bit low-key, but the sheer gracefulness of her voice, the background piano, and touch of electronic noise in the back still makes this song a great listen. [7/10]

Pryor Stroud: If “Two Weeks” was a skin-to-skin lovers’ interchange in a windowless, airless, walls-closing-in bedroom filled with vestigial lost-love mementos, then “Good to Love”, arguably the former’s psycho-spiritual sequel, is a postcoital stare-down between these lovers as they breathlessly parse out whether there’s any good to come from leaving the sheets. What do these stares signify? Can a gaze penetrate another gaze, meet it head on, so that the longings and motivations and regrets of each person are elucidated across diametrically opposed corneas? What happens when these stares enucleate the retinas before them — one by one by one by one — so that the true desires in every eye are laid bare? The stares in FKA Twigs’ “Good to Love” are the unflinching look from Manet’s Olympia doubled and pitted against itself, which is to say, these are stares that unmask truth, force its ugliness and unseemly complexity down your throat, by shattering a synthetic but previously decided-upon reality: in this case, the illusion that “real” love is a sensation of shared purity that negates and belittles all loves before it. With characteristically airy, nerve and neuroses-plagued vocals, Twigs, here, confirms that love can be real, important, and “good” even when convoluted by residuals feelings that stick in the psyche. Her words, pleading and confessional, span the length of this stare from pillow-top to pillow-top and, by the end, you realize she’s never blinked. [7/10]

Steve Horowitz: This reeks of being contemporary more than musical. I believe in love and the body as much as the next person, but the passion here has become too abstract. The song moves ahead by speeding up, but nothing really changes except the pace, and then it just ends. [5/10]

SCORE: 7.40