Adriane Pontecorvo: Producer Kingdom and singer Shacar make for a potent duo on “Breathless”. For all its electronics and Auto-Tuning, the track feels naked and stronger for it. Shacar brings heartfelt expression to his performance, both visually and vocally, and Kingdom wisely keeps beats and instrumentation to a minimum, letting Shacar’s lithe voice rise, fall, and wind around the music as the star of the song. The result is a dream, but it’s not a sweet one all the way through — it’s a little surreal, a little tormented, and layered. A powerful low-key single. [9/10]
Mike Schiller: There’s nothing effortless about “Breathless”. Maybe that’s by design, but the beats are by some measure just too busy, distracting from Shacar’s vocal, which itself seems to be trying too hard to be an artistic statement and not hard enough to be a song. It’s actually a pretty good instrumental on its own, but competing for attention with the vocalist is a bad look. Likewise, Shacar has a solid voice that’d probably be fantastic in some other song. [5/10]
Steve Horowitz: There is something so affected by the strange vocal breaks and percusssion that stops and starts. This makes the trapped feeling and hurt aestheticized. The moral of the story is get yourself together before you preach and make music. [6/10]
John Garratt: About the most stimulating thing I can say for this song is that the high-pitched ‘beep’ noises peppered in the mix sound an awful lot like the scanners we use here at work to read barcodes. Were it not for that, even ten listens to “Breathless” would fail to awake any sense of anything. Melody, dynamics, contrast, a centerpiece, some kind of tangible hook, it’s all gone missing. “Breathless” is another example, thanks to Vevo, of singles becoming vehicles for videos above anything else. And when’s the last time that ferns made you scream out loud? [2/10]
SCORE: 5.50