★★★★★
The opening track of this debut EP from 19-year-old Shamir Bailey might remind you of Friendly Fires' Jack Savidge doing a Diana Ross interpretation of their first single 'On Board', but it's even than that. The disco-worshipping, androgynous teen might hail from Las Vegas but on the strength of these five songs (three funky-house stompers, one stupendous ballad and a heart-rending cover of Lindi Ortega) it's fair to say his spiritual homeland is late-'80s Detroit and his god an ill-behaved...
- www.nme.com
2014-07-08
★★★★★
As recent albums by Disclosure and Hercules and Love Affair have shown, dance music is a gold mine of young vocal talent. And it's most exciting when a singer from beyond the usual meccas of New York, London and Berlin emerges, suggesting an interesting new perspective. A child of Las Vegas's suburbs, Shamir Bailey is an androgynously voiced teen bringing raw fragility and post-punk energy to songs about loneliness and masculinity...
- nowtoronto.com
2014-06-19
★★★★★
"I consistently felt myself to be not male or female, but the 11-year-old gender: protagonist." The words are poet Patricia Lockwood's, as quoted in a recent New York Times Magazine feature, and they come to mind when hearing the music made by Shamir Bailey. With a piercing countertenor somewhere between Prince masquerading as Camille and the cracking adolescent soul of the teenage Michael Jackson, the 19-year-old North Las Vegas native dismantles the expectations maintained for vocalists based...
- pitchfork.com
2014-06-09
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