Coming in hot with ME+YOU feels like the kind of song that plays after hours, when the doors are locked, and it’s just real ones left in the room.
IS THE KID LAROI A REGULAR ON OUR PLAYLISTS?
No. And honestly, he’s not about to become one. In places, especially when he stretches for those high notes over the backing, he gestures toward The Weeknd, but without the weight or range to actually stick the landing. JULY is the clearest example of that gap.
PRIVATE is an easy, summery listen, but it sits uncomfortably close to muzak - it is laid-back, inactive listener material. A little (maybe more than a little) Justin Bieber-y, in the modern, polite, inoffensive sense. For clarity, we like a lot of Bieber’s catalog. That’s not a dig. It’s an observation about how safely this song wants to exist. And maybe in more than one place throughout the album.
A PERFECT WORLD flirts heavy with Michael Jackson in tempo, bounce, right up until around the 1:29 mark, where we slide into lines like “my mind was racin’, you cried on vacation,” and then we’re off somewhere else.
Clara La San’s airy, delicate vocals are genuinely beautiful, but they are not enough to save THE MOMENT on their own.
The second half of the album is more engaging than the first, with more texture and more intent, but make no mistake, this is a breakup album through and through - and you are supposed to know it. Introspection, yearning, and eventually acceptance. The usual emotional journey. But we’ve been blessed with much heavier breakup albums, and of course, we’re still in the WEST END GIRL breakup era, so we’ve had raw writing elsewhere.
We know artists draw on their own lives, and nothing fuels a record quite like heartbreak. But 15 tracks is a long runway for material this cautious… and almost boring. By track 8, even though we are anti-skip, the finger was hovering over the button.
This album isn’t bad. It’s just too comfortable. And comfort is rarely what makes something stick; the most interesting and genreless thing on the album is 5.12AM.
It is not bad. It is highly polished, almost too clean. It makes us wonder what was on the album he scrapped in favor of this one.
2/5 Cups
