Review Summary: All the poison, the pleasure, the highs
It feels like a lifetime ago that
Ava Max burst onto the scene, when in fact it was only in 2018 that "Sweet But Psycho" dropped out of nowhere and essentially took over the radio. All of a sudden, the general public were all over her, and once that happens there's a lot of pressure put onto you to live up to the hype and keep delivering, otherwise you will fall into obscurity and forever be known as a one-hit wonder. It's quite frankly impressive that she didn't
completely fade away or tumble down the slope of failure due to the very troubled, nearly two-year long production of
Heaven & Hell. Fortunately, said two-year wait was very well worth it, as
Heaven & Hell just so happens to be one of the best pop debuts in years.
Musically,
Heaven & Hell isn't afraid to be even
slightly different, even if it isn't truly
that different. There's electropop, dubstep, disco and even eurodance influences, but the modern trends of pop are still here and very prominent. However, this approach works wonders in the album's favor; this becomes apparent in opening tracks "Heaven" and "Kings and Queens"; Max has made the Skrillex brand of dubstep feel fresh again, perhaps due to simultaneously keeping up on the current trends of today and fusing old and new together; the execution has been done exceptionally well and also does a great job of hooking the listener in. Max also displays her softer side in the excellent balad track "Naked", "OMG What's Happening" provides a nice little mix of 2000's eurodance with some added disco flair, and "Torn" gives us some brilliant house undertones. Throughout all of this, the synth melodies do an incredible job complimenting Max's voice, the basslines add a hell of a lot of energy, while the drum machines do excellent work with giving the tracks a solid backbone. The second half of
Heaven & Hell takes a slightly darker turn, which is especially notable in the piano-driven "Take You To Hell" as well as synth-led tracks "Belladonna" and "Rumors".
For an album that tries to have two sides to it, however,
Heaven & Hell does make it's missteps; "Who's Laughing Now" should have certainly been on the first half of the album as it's far more upbeat than the other few tracks on the side that Max considers to be "Hell". The inclusion of her previous singles also tragically ends up killing the flow of the album; "Salt" sounds a hell of a lot like a
For Lack of a Better Name-era deadmau5 track, which wasn't what they were going for with the album at all, while "So Am I" and "Sweet But Psycho" end up feeling out of place, especially with the knowledge that were initially left off the final release in the first place. Max's lyrical prowess could also use some work; while there's a lot of fairly solid writing throughout the album, there's also some ugly repetition such as the literal presence of "Ooh na-na, ooh na-na, ooh na-na" and the occassional lines that completely fall into the tank of failure such as "Break, break your heart in the mornin', don't you worry / And I'll fly, fly away before it's love, before you've boarded / Can't be grieving, no, I'm always leaving / When the sun is beating, I've beat it".
Production-wise,
Heaven & Hell is the standard heavily polished, heavily compressed beast that the industry has long been infatuated with. Brickwalling is still the way of the master, which is especially a bad thing because a lot of the album's songs would be better off sounding a lot more dynamic; though this tends to be the case with a vast majority of pop music nowadays. Despite the presence of flaws, however,
Heaven & Hell is still a very strong debut and establishes Ava Max as someone to keep a very strong eye on, as she has a lot of potential that just needs to be brought out to the forefront.
