Romance - Camila Cabello: Review
Camila Cabello
is a Cuban born pop singer who first garnered attention as a member of the pop girl group Fifth Harmony, before breaking off as a solo artist and finding success with singles like Crying In The Club and Havana which featured trap music staple Young Thug. She released her debut album early last year and it became a breakout commercial success, and after a series of singles throughout the second half of this year she is back with a second studio record.
Review By Lavender:
Given that I was never a fan of the music of Fifth Harmony I was surprised to have enjoyed Camila as much as I did. I gave the record a six and acknowledged how many mediocre pop tunes it had to offer, but in its best moments songs like In The Dark and She Loves Control showed a lot of promise for her future. I was hoping that Romance would be a step in the right direction that saw her work on consistency and establish herself as more of a unique voice in pop music. Unfortunately Romance suffers from identical problems as its predecessor and is a combination of some great tracks and some boring ones.
There is a side of this record that I really enjoy, which features consistently unique and captivating pop tunes starting with the great intro cut Shameless. The song pairs some breathy intimate singing on the verses with a belting high energy hook over some dark and rattling percussion, a great start to the record with a great performance. Senorita is a collaboration with Shawn Mendes that I think is a decent pairing. Camila out-performs Shawn severely on the track and their chemistry isn't perfect but the song has its catchy and sweet moments. My Oh My is a song that just flat out fucking rocks as Camila brings a seductive and incredibly dramatic performance that I couldn't possibly love any more. Da Baby features on the song which I didn't think was going to go over very well but he perfectly matches Camila's energy and rounds the track out with an excellent feature making for the best song of the bunch here.
Liar is a kind of hit or miss song with a really solid bridge that explodes into a fantastic dramatic chorus that I really enjoy. Unfortunately the verses are kind of a mess and her breathy singing in the second verse is one of the worst moments on the entire album. Ultimately it makes for a decent but pretty tolerable track. Bad Kind Of Butterflies is a great tune and I like to think of it as what Billie Eilish thinks she sounds like. Camila softly cries out emotionally charged lyrics over a dark and ethereal beat with a pounding breakdown on the hook that grew on me more and more every time I heard it. Cry For Me is a pretty solid single that I liked quite a bit and still enjoy here as it puts together an emotional urgency and one of the catchier and better written hooks the record has to offer. This Love is a pretty dramatic song that effectively dabbles in an on and off relationship with a great hook the features a strong instrumental breakdown and is one of the best tracks here. Finally we've got Used To This a pretty great track that just oozes personality in a somber and dramatic way. I particularly like how much she is willing to shit talk San Francisco but mostly because I hope Mark Kozelek decides to drop a Camila Cabello diss track.
While these tracks would combine for a very solid Camila Cabello record there are unfortunately a number of very disappointing cuts here too. Living Proof is flat out terrible it sounds like a Taylor Swift song from ten years ago with an absolutely awful drum line and a breathy underwritten hook. The "choir singing hallelujah" refrain is one of the worst things I've heard all year. Should've Said It has a really cheesy acoustic bridge that is some serious camp counselor grade guitar playing that pairs horribly with the squeaky synths and gives the track no momentum or flow. Easy is a song that is just painfully generic and really could have gone to just about any female pop singer and sounded just about the same.
Feel It Twice and Dream Of You are a pair of tracks that are so dreadfully boring and leave me wondering what the point is as neither of them really do anything to stand out or be originally Camila and seem to just fill out the tracklist. Finally the closing track is First Man which I really wanted to like as the dramatic closing track to the album but it just isn't very good. The mix is super dry and the keys get halfway lost in Camila's breathy sung vocals that aren't really satisfying and pair with an underwritten song. This could be a track by The Fray if that gets across how saccharine and underwhelming it is.
Romance isn't quite the step forward for Camila that I had hoped it would be, but that doesn't mean it's bad. Once again there are a number of songs here that prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that Camila should be one of the main pop girls of our time, but the album is filled out with songs that just don't do enough to stand out. Despite this there is more than enough here that is worthwhile that I have no problem recommending Romance to fans of pure pop music and calling it one of the better pop records I've heard this year, but still nowhere near the top. 6/10
