Rapid Fire Reviews: Early Year Pop with Sam Smith, Kimbra, & Ava Max
Just barely a month into the year, I've somehow already missed three pop records I planned on talking about for various reasons. Let's remedy that.
Gloria - Sam Smith
Normally I wouldn't even be paying attention to a Sam Smith release, much less reviewing it. But then of course, Unholy happened, not only the best single I've ever heard from them, but also their most interesting song to date. That meant I was obviously going to pay attention to this album to see if it was some kind of sea change for Sam Smith or at least a point where they would be offering more stylistic risks than on any of their previous efforts. Given the scant tracklist of just 11 full songs, almost all of which are quite short, I was hoping there would be some major swings at different styles one after another. But the actual result is a record that's still pretty tame and also pretty scant on top of it.
Thematically the album has a general tide of accepting yourself, coming to terms with your emotions, and helping the people around you come to terms with theirs. In that sense lead single Unholy, which I still enjoy quite a bit is a pretty significant outlier in the tracklist. My favorite thematic highlight among the deep cuts is How To Cry which explores a toxic relationship in pretty explicit detail. I like that the song makes an attempt to explain why the other person in the relationship reached the point where they are abusive with a hook that says "nobody taught you how to cry, but somebody showed you how to lie." On the sonic side of things, this album will certainly feel familiar to Sam Smith fans with a lot of the emotional British soul influence that comes through on pretty much all of their records. In fact, the singles are some of the only songs in the tracklist that subvert this which makes some of the duds in the tracklist like Lose You and Gimmie feel even more annoying. Speaking of Gimmie this album handles its collaborations pretty strangely. Jessie Reyez appears on the album three times and her best contribution comes on I'm Not Here To Make Friends which is an obvious leftover from Calvin Harris' Funk Wav Bounces Vol 2 last year but honestly sounds better instrumentally than most of that record did. For some reason instead of ending on the short but beautiful gospel-inspired title track the record decides to bow out after a wimpy collaborative ballad with Ed Sheeran that sets both artists back to their most boring sounds. Goria has a lot to say but I'm thoroughly unimpressed by the sound and style of the record. Instead of making their boldest move yet for better or for worse, Sam Smith just leaned into the fundamentals that have been making them a boring artist for years and the result is a record that I don't expect to stand the test of time. 5/10
A Reckoning - Kimbra
I've always thought of Kimbra as an underrated pop artist and I think there are a few reasons for that. She's definitely artsier than a lot of her contemporaries and she's an international artist who doesn't really release music that often. So I'm not surprised that she isn't a superstar but after how much I enjoyed her 2018 album Primal Heart I'm surprised she hasn't received a bit more acclaim along the way. She's back now five years later with her fourth album which I was pretty suspicious of after some strange singles. Turns out my suspicions were justified because this is the least I've enjoyed one of her records to date. The haunting eeriness of save me did grab me at first but the more I listened to it the less satisfied I was with the song's conclusion with vocals that don't really match the intensity it should have. I was even less interested in replay! which has an instrumental I thought was cool at first but never won me over with any of the vocals or refrains. Unfortunately, the remainder of the record's first half represents an even harder listen though it often comes really close to making something sleek and cool. The combination of murky R&B-flavored production with some stuttering hip-hop beats and faster refrains has a LOT of potential but I can't lie, Kimbra sounds like a mom while doing it.
In the second half of the record, she borrows from hip-hop in a more direct way by grabbing rappers like Erick The Architect and Pink Siifu for features. It's cool that she displays a taste for rap that goes deeper than surface level and I'm choosing to think that these collaborators were prized rather than settled for. But they way they are interpolated into the record is just absolutely goofy. Not only do they feel like they don't belong on instrumentation like this but Kimbra tries to meet them halfway in terms of swagger and it doesn't go well. The only song on the record that really feels like it actually lives up to the record's nocturnal promises is personal space which even I have to admit is a banger. I really do admire Kimbra for taking some risks on this record and it won't dissuade me at all from checking out whatever she does next, but A Reckoning just presents too many ideas that feel beyond Kimbra's range. The sleekness it takes to pull off a record like this might be somewhere in her wheelhouse, it just isn't on display here. 4/10
Diamonds & Dancefloors - Ava Max
On her 2020 debut album Heaven & Hell Ava Max failed to make much of any impression on me whatsoever. While her big hit Sweet But Psycho is the very definition of faceless I at least thought her next hit Kings & Queens was a little better. But on her debut album it just felt like she had nothing to do but try and be various other more well-defined pop stars. While I wouldn't count out her ever having another hit given how much the industry seems to like her, the lack of success in this era so far sort of spoke to how fragile her fanbase really is. It's all relative of course but where the singles from her debut were massive and impossible to escape, there's only one song from here you might have heard by accident, Maybe You're The Problem. Unfortunately, much like her debut you can take almost every song on this album and trace it really easily to a recent artist or hit. For much of the album that artist is Dua Lipa, which is funny because the album she's obviously querying from Future Nostalgia actually came out before her debut but had a parade of hit after hit and a pretty massive cultural influence. Ultimately, if the song writing was here I could still see this kind of working to some capacity, but the songwriting is absolutely not here. None of the immediacy or compelling drama of Dua's music translates into Ava's and it makes this 40 minutes of music feel like hours. This is basically the dance-pop album that comes with the frame. The production and recording obviously sounds very professional and clean but there is no life being breathed into these songs from any direction. While I wouldn't be surprised if she pops up as the vocalist on some producer's mega-hit EDM song in 3 years, I think this record was a massive failure in terms of defining the things that make Ava Max a unique artist, if anything it's a regression from her already underwhelming debut. 2.5/10
