Review Summary: Suitable supplementary content to keep your eardrums pleased during your love crusade, sealed with a kiss from Karen O.
Emotions are a strange, bizarre, no-questions-answered thing that plague young adults worldwide. You don't know why you feel certain ways sometimes, and when you finally think you've got a hold on one emotion, you'll often find a new one emerging from some dark corner you weren't even aware existed. For Karen O, an attempt to tackle said emotions comes in the form of her debut solo album
Crush Songs, which clocks in at just under thirty minutes with fifteen songs that O recorded on the road through her late twenties, providing glimpses into her life through deeply personal (and tragically short) vignettes.
This week, I returned to my high school "hometown" in North Carolina to attend my brother's high school graduation. The immense wave of nostalgia that crashed down upon me in the form of memories and metaphorical ghosts was unexpected and came to a complete head when I found a copy of this album on vinyl in a Barnes & Noble. All past crushes and flames that had before seemed like smoke coming off the wick of a candle long since dead now seemed vibrant in hindsight. It was time to immerse myself once again into musings of a love drunk/love sick/lovely Karen O.
For background: I'm currently a third of the way through my twenties and had not listened to the album since it first released. I recall putting it on and using it as background music when writing or messing around, etc. I didn't put much thought into it, basically. This time around, I put on the album and took an eyes-wide-shut (read: laying down on the couch in a deserted house) journey through Karen O's love life recorded in hotel rooms on laptops while globe trotting. It felt much more personal, much more realized than it had years prior.
The songs come in short bursts, much like fleeting crushes, and each track seems like a small poem that would be used as the post-script on a love letter to Karen O's latest flame - they catch glimpses and pieces of each relationship (or lack thereof) without giving the listener an over-the-top description of the entire event. It feels like Karen O's way of saying "You want a love album, listen to a love album. This is a crush album." It's a new approach that should not be imitated, but instead revered.
