The track “What’s Love Without You” goes in an Electronic music direction, tapping into CHANIDU’s vulnerability and talent. It begins with a reserved keyboard chord (one that slightly resembles a David Guetta song, interestingly enough), followed by him actually singing heartfelt lines. The chorus’s disco beat sounds a bit more reserved and warmer than, say, the blaring saws in “Without You,” ft. Usher too. And CHANIDU’s delivery even earns him the right to have a faux-orchestra play behind him in the second verse without sounding too flashy.
This achievement is all the more remarkable given that he has so little to work with: basically four iterations of the same melody per verse, arrayed over a block chord-based backing containing almost nothing in the way of fills or counter-melodies. Engaging the listener with just your vocal line under such circumstances is tremendously tough going. First of all, you have to differentiate each new repeat of the melody in some manner, to keep it sounding fresh, but not so much that you lose all sense of its underlying contour. Then you have to somehow link the individual little vocal phrases so that they generate some momentum through each iteration of the melody, while simultaneously building the tension through all four melodic repetitions of each verse, as well as through the song as a whole. So in this critique, I’d like to just say the song is a great experiment with electronic music for the soul.