Review Summary: Mildly entertaining contemporary pop from an artist known for pursuing much more thrilling ventures.
It’s not really all that surprising that stage actress of Broadway fame, Megan Hilty’s debut album
It Happens All the Time is a mediocre and generic collection of lukewarm pop tunes, because it really is a case where it’s the type of album that, ironically, happens all the time. Megan Hilty is known for producing energetic performances bursting with personality and raw singing talent in both her role in the musical
Wicked, and her character in the musical-drama television show
Smash, but what Hilty succeeds in is just that and that alone: the quality of her performances.
As evidenced by the conventional pop tracks on
It Happens All the Time that easily could have been songs from any other female singer in modern day pop, Hilty can perform quite well vocally, but just like the average singer who emerges from American Idol and X-Factor fame, there’s far too much concentration put on Hilty's vocal skills on her debut album, and with her not having much in the way of inspiration and more in the way of unregulated emulation, the songs here sound extremely processed with the music clearly being treated as an afterthought, and with such tired themes the album comes off as unnaturally impersonal for a performer who usually brings such character and personality into her roles.
The only thing that really separates any of these songs from the hundreds of sound-alikes is an element of classiness and sophistication that brings this music to a more mature and elegant level, but more than often it just sounds like a plain and stiff bore. This is uncharacteristically tame for someone who has been frequently involved in Broadway, and one would think that Hilty might have used her experiences as a stage actress as a source of inspiration to make her own music more theatrical and animated, but in the end,
It Happens All the Time just sounds like an album that gets released all the time nowadays, and with how vanilla and same-old it can be, it mainly sounds like unreached potential. There's nothing inherently bad about it, but nothing that makes it standout in any way.
