Review Summary: Palatably Comatose Music
Since time immemorial people have been taking advantage of other people’s discrepancies in assessing what is and isn’t worth a damn. This is not something I think about often, but Hannah Diamond made it an active concern from the moment I committed the enormous error of overthinking her debut album, Reflections. Don’t overthink Reflections. For the love of God, please do not. I’ve done some legwork that, amongst other things, hopefully captures exactly how unpleasant it is to lend this music too much, but if this has confirmed one thing for me, it’s that this is an album to trust your gut over. And so:
We often evaluate things by differentiating their positive and negative qualities into two separate categories and pitching them against one another; a judgement can be formed from how convincingly one comes out on top of the other. This is a dialectic process and we’ve basically been using it since the dawn of time - you can thank ancient Greece for the raw deal, but there’s some great fan fiction to do with logic and class struggle. When weighed up in this fashion, Hannah Diamond and her shiny new album come off pretty well: Reflections is a cohesively executed trance pop record with pristine production from PC Music mastermind A. G. Cook. Diamond’s airy vocals are an easy fit for Cook’s trademark synthetica, relatively pared back to afford her consistent prominence in the arrangement. The strength of the pair’s longstanding working relationship is obvious throughout; Reflections is impeccably realised and hardly falters in its bubblegum daydream vision.
Love Goes On, for instance, sees a sparse arrangement carry Diamond’s steady verses with a gentle sense of momentum. Every part of the mix is given the space it needs to resonate and its simplicity is underpinned by sense of expert craftsmanship - anyone looking for flaws in Reflections’ execution will find themselves digging deep before they churn up anything halfway worthwhile. So far, so good.
Unfortunately for Ms. Diamond, dialectic isn’t the only tool in the consumer/perceiver/critic/sentient being (delete as appropriate)’s belt. Oh no. In Dante’s Inferno, the furthest depths of Hell are not categorised by raging, actively destructive hellfire and megaawesome superdemons, but by ice, stasis and inertia. Satan is an infantile husk spending eternity chewing on a few choice sinners for the sole reason that he doesn’t know any better, the point being that quote-unquote evil is not so much a distinct category as the place you inevitably end up if you’re sufficiently short on worthwhile and/or virtuous qualities. Active flaws (or lack thereof) are irrelevant and positive values are the only ones that count: you’ve either got ‘em or you ain’t. Apologies to those in the dialectic camp, but this perspective tears Reflections apart like a fox in a henhouse.
The problem with this album has little with the competence of those involved, resting more on the fundamental misconception of the whole venture; if you recall, Satan was damn good at chewing, but that didn’t lift the essential hopelessness of his situation one jot. It’s a little harsh, however, to kick off with fundamentals given that Reflections is meant to be processed superficially, so let’s start on that: Reflections’ aesthetic is a masterpiece of quaintness perfectly pitched to land in a very unextremely slightly grating manner. Its clear tones and unchallenging melodies come so close to tame, inoffensive nonsense that Diamond’s one-step-beyond-innocuously-banal lyrics and Cook’s modulation of her voice play out as the height of distinction and give it the closest thing it has to an active edge. Leaving the production aside for a moment, this unlikely duality is by far the most impressive part of Reflections. It’s subtle, fascinating and guaranteed to get under people’s skin one way or another, and I am a fan. It would likely spark large amounts of joy were it not for the unfortunate necessity of its incarnation as 39 minutes of almost uniquely insufferable pop.
Reflections not so much one of the traditionally worst albums I’ve heard in my time (as per dialectic) as much as one of the most unforgivably dull (as per Dante). I retain my praise for its craft on the presumption that Diamond and Cook actively wished to set a vapid daydream to music, but its realisation as such belies a total absence of stakes or intrigue. The album lacks the punch to land a single memorable hook, opting for mindless reiterations of Diamond’s laconic phrasings to the extent that they lose any initial resonance. This is not helped by a concertedly vanilla repertoire of melodies, which lack even a hint of dissonance. Not edgy abrasive dissonance - just the basic enabler of tension and release that makes most music engaging. Take the single
True's meandering around a set of alternatively ascending and descending phrases: any tension is instantly resolved by the following note and the melody ends up continually shifting its weight only to wind up going nowhere (see
Invisible for a near-exact repeat of the same pitfall). The album is also too humdrum to be atmospheric, trance genre tags be damned: Cook’s production style lends its far more to instant gratification than expansive soundscapes, and Diamond’s kitsch breeziness is too trite in its aesthetic and too immediate in its delivery to fill in as a lasting ambience. This does not bode well for Reflections’ insistence on a homogenous approach to its tracklisting. Almost every song here is cut from the same drab cloth and moves through the same sequence of airheaded verses and lilting choruses. I count two minor exceptions:
Concrete Angel is a slow burning banger and probably the best track on the album, taking relatively engaging liberties with its arrangement, structure and voice modulation as it builds into a trance freakout in its final half-minute, while
Fade Away tries to up the stakes with a traditional club-ready build-and-drop that is somewhat undercut by Diamond’s unwavering delivery of the same inanity that runs through the rest of the album and has likely desensitised the listener to the point that renders a late game banger too little too late.
Hannah Diamond’s vocals are very much the make-or-break here. The production is strong but rarely foregrounds itself as a primary attraction, opting instead to place the vocals centre-stage. Diamond's delivery is so purposefully bland that her prevailing impression is that of a particularly uninquisitive child vocalising its first major scale without adult supervision. This is not entirely a criticism; as established, it’s clearly the intention here, and Diamond fills the role perfectly. However, I struggle to respond to the this style's stubborn protraction as the focal part of any given moment here with anything more than pure tedium. We’ve covered the use of deliberately simplistic vocal melodies, but when these are saddled with lyrics in the ballpark of “You said that you've been thinking/things need time to sink in/but when I'm without you/I can't stop my heart sinking,” the inevitable, baited reaction of
is this for real? kicks in. Tongue-in-cheek lyricism is A-ok in my book, but it doesn’t quite cut it when delivered in such a banal fashion, unaccompanied by auxiliary elements of similar crassness. Other PC Music-associated efforts have backed themselves up with daring maximalism and rich ironic potential; irony has played a widely debated (but very much present) role in the realm of the collective, but it’s hardly to be found here. Diamond’s conscientiously immature scope gives us nothing but sheer stubbornness, and since the production is well-behaved and largely devoted to supplementing her vocals there is very little overtly ‘fun’ about Reflections beyond the triteness of the lyrics themselves.
This lands things in a tricky spot: either we take Diamond’s musings as innocuous and playful and treat the album as lighthearted entertainment (which I have neither the patience nor suspension of disbelief for), or we are asked to accept them as a wilful quirk in the face of an overall serious outsourcing of A. G. Cook’s goofball irreverence into the sphere of Critical Significance. Reflections is too dry to be entertaining and too trite to be taken seriously. As such, I can’t pinpoint its target audience beyond the unfortunate category of people who devote themselves to rationalising the appeal of bubblegum in the austere, jaded language of elitist pop; people who (to quote granitenotebook on A. G. Cook’s Personal Computer Music) once wasted their words “ignoring the real purpose of the music in favor of assumptions that there had to be something that kept this from being the same as the bubblegum…they had previously largely ignored.” The catch here is where once the “real purpose” of this sound was once independently minded, set on forging its own set of conventions with open disregard to critical naysay, Reflections pulls a volte-face and inverts Cook’s scope into an unobtrusive nod and wink in the direction of mainstream critics who, by stunning coincidence, have been swift to laud it. How exciting.
With all this considered, it should be enough to call Reflections the most boring album of the year and move on, but I think there’s a little more digging to do. It’s inadequate to dismiss Cook’s input as a bland pitch to tastemakers or Diamond’s voice as childish and facile: the latter in particular would be the height of hypocrisy coming from me, as someone who routinely listens to Japanese bedroom pop and has been accused of on indulging in ‘babytalk' vocal performances more times than I care to recall. Let’s look at Diamond’s style a bit closer: the Guardian’s four-star review puts it neatly insofar as “Diamond has a naive style of delivery […] combined with the deliberately simple lyrics […] she reminds us of how love, and particularly heartbreak, make us as needy, baffled and inarticulate as children.” That’s the human half of Hannah Diamond, the kind that adopts a childishly simplistic manner and sings about romance in an ‘innocent’ way that strips it off all the drama and pain and risk and stakes that traditionally make it an interesting topic: aesthetically subversive with without the substantive follow-through the pins down a worthwhile subversion. The other half lies in the way her voice is modulated, as the semblance of Hannah Diamond over what is essentially a computer-controlled avatar (or vice versa). Now, the interplay between these two has been the subject of discussion within and beyond her music; her selectively sentient vocaloid impersonation is somewhat interesting, and there’s a worthwhile essay to be written about PC Music and the human reclamation of the infantilised robot voice.
In practice, however, Diamond’s pop art snippets of tranquillised emotional unrest land in the fashion of all pop art: as an abruptly expiring end in and of themselves. The only depth that can be extracted from them with immediate relevance to this music has deconstructed from their lack of depth, which is a rabbithole that can be explored inside out without making Reflections any less of a slog to get through. I described Diamond’s impression earlier as that of a particularly uninquisitive child; uninquistive is the key word here. Other childish vocal performances tend to be engaging because of a wide-eyed wonder at the strangeness of the world; they play into the transparent expressiveness of immature voices instead of toning things down with adult nuances and restraint. Reflections’ mundane subject matter and roundabout delivery veers sharply in the opposite direction; Hannah Diamond might as well be describing wallpaper on this album, not that her supposed emotional complexities are much more interesting. Furthermore, the selectively robotic touch on her voice isn’t particularly groundbreaking when you glance back at Cook’s discography or the Asian records that form part of his foundation - there’s not all that much to separate Reflected from, say, the ditsiest cuts from early Perfume albums (
Baby Cruising Love or
575, anyone?). The critical difference is that while Perfume was outgoing, eminently danceable and harmonically complex, Hannah Diamond gives the impression of staring at her shoes in between (and during) lines and continually playing to the lowest common denominator. Given that I can’t identify anything meaningfully subversive in her delivery, I’m not sure how I feel about about Cook and co. appropriating a delivery style normalised within a culture infamous for its sexualisation of immaturity for novelty appeal to a Western audience largely insensitive to this context, but this is perhaps part of a broader conversation not exclusive to Hannah Diamond and best saved for another day.
We could agonise all day long over the theoretical particulars of Reflections, but this won’t make it any less dull or uninspiring an album. 2015 saw Hannah Diamond attest that “I’m way more on a subtle detail level than a sexual level,” yet Reflections’ dreary heartbreak tunes are without a trace of subtlety in how they deal with the most prosaic of sexual subject matter; Diamond can sugarcoat, sidestep and infantilise her recycled, sanitary guy+gal scenarios all she likes, but the
anything but face value attitude that safeguards PC Music and its reception can only save her for so long: these songs hold no lasting interest and are only memorable in the way of the turgid atmosphere fostered by an overzealous aircon system. While I won’t play down my hostility towards this album and everything it stands for, it’s worth noting that it shouldn’t be taken as an excuse to dump on PC music. It’s been a decent year for the collective: Pang was a tasteful, convincing album that succeeded everywhere Reflections failed; Charli was infectious, exciting and innovative; GFOTY dropped an atrocious EP playfully ironical enough to be somehow listenable. Reflections is a solitary dud, but what a dud it is: even compared to the worst of 2019’s pop lethargy, it should be decked with a capitalised ‘avoid’ notice. It makes Lana del Rey’s privileged ennui seem like a meaningful voice of protest; it makes Hatchie’s defrosted dream pop sound like
Heaven or Las Vegas; it even goes so far as to make Billie Eilish look like a subversive innovator. If there’s any record on this year’s pop circuit you feel a need to pass on, make sure it’s this one - chances are you won’t be picked up on it in years to come.
