Strangely, considering this isn’t brilliant – and that it could easily have been recorded a year before by someone else without anyone batting an eyelid – Your Cheating Ways perhaps offered unwitting fans more of a clue to the Marvelettes’ future sound than first realised. (6)
I can’t necessarily imagine anyone picking it out as one of their all-time favourites (though no doubt there’ll be some in the comments section!), but there’s really very little wrong with it; for me it just doesn’t go quite far enough, doesn’t scrape the sky in the way it keeps threatening. Still, on a good day, there’s little to touch it. (7)
Whatever their style, the Marvelettes have very, very few duff records in their future, something underlined by this supposedly throwaway B-side, an unexpected little treat. (7)
It feels effortless, like so many of the very best Motown records do; the Marvelettes were growing up alongside Motown itself, and it’s reassuring to find they were still able to mix it right at the forefront, to match whatever their peers were doing. (8)
It’ll never be mistaken for a prime bit of classic Marvelettes, and it’s not in the same league as the A-side, but with these girls it’s always good to hear more – and in the absence of an album, well, it’s nice to catch up on what they’d been up to. (5)
Probably the best-sounding Marvelettes single to date, certainly the most “grown up”, and – again – excellent. (8)
Artless and joyless, this is one of the weakest records the Marvelettes ever released, especially on a 45, and the song should never have left the drawing board. (2)
Probably the Marvelettes’ best single in two years, even if I’m not sure quite how it managed to be so (and I’m not convinced they did either). Still, it’s hard to argue with results like these. (8)
A really good little record, small in scale but beautifully formed. (7)
Ever wanted to know what a Motown cover of “Charlie Had A Pigeon” / “I’m A Little Dutch Girl” would sound like? Wonder no more. (6)
If the Marvelettes’ sales figures weren’t getting better, this is ample proof that on their day the group still deserved to be counted among Motown’s best. Remarkable. (9)
The song is good, but the record isn’t. If they’d had another couple of weeks to work on this, it might have been spectacular; instead, it’s a missed opportunity, and showbiz never allows you too many of those. (6)
if the Marvelettes were about to give up their crown as Motown’s top girl group, they were doing so as gracefully as possible. (7)
The Marvelettes’ weakest single to date, this should really have been left on the album where it belonged. 4
Remarkable, and wholly excellent. (9)
Neither a travesty nor a masterpiece, it’s a decent pop single with a somewhat irritating lead in the choruses; for a pop group who’d so recently specialised in the extraordinary, this just doesn’t hit the spot. (5)
A totally average-sounding early-Sixties girl group record with poorly-conceived, unsympathetic lyrics. Compared to the A-side, this can’t help but be a major disappointment. (5)
The best record the Marvelettes ever made; magnificent, and beautiful, and forever. (10)
This is one of the best records the Marvelettes ever made, and it simply couldn’t have been left hidden away on the album. (9)
The whole thing just works, and it’s fun, and young, and summery, and I love it. (7)
It’s not awful, but it’s highly nondescript. Helpfully, though, this record marks a sort of staging post for the Marvelettes: the end of a digressionary, dead-end period. 3
If the stellar, never-to-be-recaptured magic of their début single had been something of a quirk, a statistical oddity if not an outright fluke, then in many ways the Marvelettes’ story really begins right here. (6)
No, on the whole, it’s good. It is. It’s just not pants-wettingly good, and so it suffers by comparison to the original, which I love. Which is more my problem than the Marvelettes’, I know, but there we are. (6)
Ultimately, it’s not terrible, but the Marvelettes had come down from a whole different level to get here.
Not a patch on the A-side, and Wanda’s incredibly high pitched falsetto vocals are actually painful to listen to in places.
This is just about as good as any pop record that had ever been made up to that point, and while it would still be years before Motown approached anywhere near this level of quality on every release, it’s still an essential inclusion in any Motown best-of shortlist. In a word: marvellous. (10)
