Review Summary: 'Natural Born Losers' is determined to make you feel uncomfortable, and Dollanganger wouldn't have it any other way.
In the media world, it's rarely the big, gruesome monsters that are unsettling. Admittedly, I'm pretty sure that given the choice I'd rather never encounter a 20 stone pile of necromancied, decaying flesh (however unlikely that may be), but hiding behind the detaching barrier of a TV screen or a radio speaker, only the best written raise more than a quizzical eyebrow. The same goes for televised serial killers, regardless of how heinous their crimes may have been. Even as an arachnophobe, I can watch the ugliest spider give birth to hundreds of spiderlings and barely flinch, once that divisor is there. What is truly jarring is the ostensibly innocent, and
Natural Born Losers is the perfect showcase of this.
Now, Canadian singer/songwriter Nicole Dollanganger doesn't exactly
terrify me, yet there is something unquestionably disturbing about her juxtaposing of sugary, childlike vocals and twisted, bleak tales that serve to appal under a coating of vulnerability. An almost exclusively vocal-driven album, much of the focus is on this relationship between this overly sweet delivery and its lyrical content, which deals with topics including (and not restricted to) hunting, rape, murder, the porn industry and capital punishment. Under dysfunctional personas, she's able to create both the most horrible, unredeemable characters, such as those in 'Poacher's Pride' and 'Swan', and those trapped in abusive, meaningless or demeaning existences, as most other tracks seem to. This makes it difficult to decide what to feel as
Natural Born Losers reaches its close, but its overwhelming sense of cruel misery is uncomfortably addictive.
Dollanganger's sweet/acidic one-two proves the rightful standout on every track (except for obvious reasons the instrumental track 'A Marvelous Persona'), and 'Mean', 'White Trashing', 'In The Land', 'Angels of Porn (II)' and 'You're So Cool' in particular are all affecting, intelligent invokers of morbid fascination. Unfortunately, a sense of musical and structural monotony becomes increasingly noticeable as
Natural Born Losers progresses. 'Swan' is a beautiful track lyrically but loses out on memorability, and 'American Tradition' is nowhere near a bad song but finds itself suffering from maudlin 'sameness', a consequence of the stark, basic atmosphere the music creates.
The difficulty with this approach is that because it places so much emphasis on the vocal performance, Nicole's less engaging melodies harm the overall track so much more. Consequentially,
Natural Born Losers finds itself on the precipice of masterpiece territory, but perhaps fittingly, can't seem to make that final leap. As a narrative on the uglier facets of humanity it's fantastically effective, and Dollanganger's voice is without a doubt the perfect medium for this, but there's something intangibly 'missing' from a couple of tracks. For the most part though, this is an album to play again and again, forever wondering whether 'enjoy' is truly the right word to use when establishing the relationship one has with it.
. Pos'd hard. 
