By Heidi
The song opens playful enough with the bass, but quickly falters to have a repetitive bland synth in the foreground. I often have the feeling that Duran Duran clutter the sound with too many indistinct instruments. That does not happen with All of You. The instrumentation suits the clarity of the lyrics in this song. It feels like chorus and verses are too similar which makes the song somewhat boring. Where the verses and chorus musically feel similar, the lyrics point in two different directions. At first the lyrics are like a lovesong in reverse: ‘Yes, yes, yes, I do love you and stop pestering me just because you want me to confirm that I do love you’ seems to be the bottomline of the verses. Here the toll the constant doubt of the loved one takes on the lover is visible. In contrast the chorus is a full-blown declaration of love. There aren’t many of those in Duran Duran’s catalogue.
This could easily have been a song I would readily skip had it not been for what happens after the bridge. Here the two partners sing almost the same but in different ways and with different instrumentation which could indicate differences of opinion about the state of their relationship. The way their voices blend towards the end of the song left me with a vision of their voices in soaring intertwined spirals – both playful and dangerous because it is dangerous to want ‘everything’ and ‘all of you’ and to be too demanding. To me the beginning is a little dull while the end has all the excitement although excitement may not be the right word for this very middle of the road pop song which harms no one.
This, sadly, is not one of my favorite songs on the album. I’m not sure why, I think the word ‘boring’ might be part of the reason. Oddly, the first time I heard it, I felt like it was a ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic song, and it confused me. And I love Weird Al, so you’d think that would make it a slam dunk, but no. I only perked up when about three quarters through Nick’s synths do something interesting .At this point I have decided to not skip it, to see if it’s a grower, but I think that for me, this is one of the ‘merely ok’ songs. Hey. it’s alright. Merely ok Duran is still far better than most of the music out there.