The Rise And Fall Of A Midwest Princess – Chappell Roan
After two listens, I’m going to have to call it. Not because it’s bad or I’ve had enough, but I’m off to Spain today, and I don’t want to have to type all of this out on a phone next week.
Whilst I agree with Foggy that I’m not comfortable listening to young women singing sexually explicit lyrics, I’m not convinced it’s a great thing for men or artists in general to do either. Like the best directors who can provoke emotions and convey feeling by showing just enough and cutting away at the optimum point, I think the best songwriters and performers are capable of doing the same. Still, it’s her first album and she’s trying to make a name for herself, so what better way than being outrageous?
On its upbeat numbers, the sound of the album is straight out of the 80s, which is fine; it sits alongside many other albums in that regard. It’s nothing new and it’s no better or worse for it.
One thing that this album has in common with a lot of modern artists is that on many songs, you hear the voice and a sound – what sound? I don’t always know, but some
sound – more than I hear the instruments. I mean, I’m sure there are individual instruments there, but the overall sound is a digital, sanitised slurry, which is ironic given some of the lyrics. Maybe if she combined those lyrics with a razor’s edge guitar and throbbing bass even more people would sit up and take notice (but probably not the young audience she is after). To be fair, there’s some nice piano on “Kaleidoscope” and a short-lived outbreak of acoustic picking on “Guilty Pleasure” but these moments are few and far between.
I notice that
@BlueHammer85 said that he might listen to a Taylor Swift album at some point. Whilst her growing legion of fans would no doubt point you to her most recent efforts, I feel they also suffer from the “digital slurry” effect in parts and instead, I’d direct you backwards to when her sound was more basic, and she had a proper band sound that combined with her brilliant bridges and choruses. As for comparison between Taylor Swift and Chappell Roan, from a purely musical standpoint there really is no comparison; different lyrical approach, different production styles – go and listen to the
Fearless album and tell me that Chappell Roan is in the same league.
I enjoyed the vocals in “After Midnight”, just kooky (is that an American word?) enough without being annoying. “Coffee”, with its strings, has a different feel and it shows that she can sing and adapt her voice to different styles. Considering Foggy was desperate for some BPM, I’m surprised at how many slower songs appear on this album. Is this really an album that you’d dance to? I’d say that for more than half its running time, it’s an album that you’d sit and listen to whilst sipping a cappuccino.
When all is said and done, it’s not a bad album but there’s nothing to make me want to listen again. I’ll go for a same-as-Radiohead
5.5/10.
