Review Summary: Gabrille Aplin throws away her safety blanket - to great effect.
I think most people share some modicum of respect for an individual that shows willingness to step off of their home turf in an effort to reinvent themselves, Granted, the success rate of such a transition isn’t great (the less said about Michael Jordan’s ill fated baseball career the better), but hell, trying new things is scary. So when I heard that Gabrielle Aplin, the most generic of this wave of acoustic gospel singers was making a more mainstream influenced pop record – my ounce of respect for such a change was certainly overshadowed by my skepticism.
But I’ll be damned, she pulled it off and, for the most part, makes it sound easy. The opener "Until The Sun Comes Up" opens with low murmurs that suddenly flip into bouncy, vocoder soaked vocals that are so confident and fun it’s hard to not immediately believe in Aplin. It would be easy to write an entire record with this formula and it would probably still be pretty fun to listen to, but Aplin makes an effort to twist pop song formulas around in interesting ways as often as possible. Like in the track "Strange", which features a funky bass groove and minimal percussion which Aplin croons and yelps over. It’s undeniably a song that sounds awkward on paper, but Aplin’s charisma makes it work.
Dear Happy is full of pop songs with slight twists to keep the listener engaged.
In her previous work, it could be debated if Aplin was even aware there were instruments other than her (admittedly impressive) vocal stylings. Her songs had this uncomfortable Christian youth worship band quality: pretty vocals intended for a singular purpose; to be pretty.
Dear Happy addresses this, with Aplin’s vocals taking a more supportive role rather than being the star. In fact, Aplin only really *belts* on "Invisible", a song that blends a traditional piano ballad with more modern synth-wave.
There’s a lot to be said about the production throughout
Dear Happy. The newfound instrumentation really allows the album to hold up to multiple listens. The songs glint and shine and slide in all the right places, making the tracks go by surprisingly quickly. The sliding synths of "Nothing Really Matters" keep the momentum moving even when Aplin chooses to tone her vocals down, while the thudding toms throughout the chorus of "So Far So Good" give the song an extra later of danceability that can be appreciated after the refrain has been heard a dozen times.
There is absolutely some filler here, which is to be expected from a 14 track record. "One of Those Days" is emotionally resonant but the track itself is an awkward exercise in minimalism, which the album to this point has not attempted – for good reason. "Kintsugi" is just a cringe fest, with a staccato chorus where Aplin repeats the word “kintsugi” (the name for the Japanese art of mending broken things) ad nauseam. The metaphor is heavy handed and not worth the irritating slog that is that song. "My Mistake", the emotional core of the album is a lone piano ballad that sonically sounds like it fell out of her early EPs, but with surprisingly grim lyrics about depression, failure, and pushing others away. These lyrical themes are explored in other areas, such as the "Losing Me", but there’s nothing you haven’t heard before here. The cliché of “I will be here for you” is sweet but not even Aplin’s considerable charisma can make the words sound any more original.
Despite a few missteps, Gabrielle Aplin seems to have made the transition from generic acoustic/piano singer to a modern pop artist within a single album. Even when the album fails to live up to her obvious talent, it’s hard to not feel like you’re hearing something new and exciting from an artist who has spent her career up to this point playing it as safe as possible. So to Gabrielle Aplin, wherever you are: keep reinventing yourself, you’ve got good things ahead of you.
