Review Summary: Barbenheimer II: Carly Raephex Twin (Part Two)
Hot on the heels of last year’s
The Loneliest Time, Carly Rae Jepsen, innocuous Canadian superqueen, has again returned to us afresh once more with a shiny new album. It is
The Loveliest Time; it is a time. Breaking the tradition established by
Emotion and
Dedicated, she has announced that this is not a follow-up collection of B-sides, but a fully-fledged companion record. This is curious (read:
outright unfortunate) because
The Loveliest Time is the most B-sideular ‘album’ experience I’ve found in my paws so far this year: its consistency is gaseous, its stylistic hopscotch is even more erratic than that of its sister album, it is a product of the same sessions, and - most importantly - it contains a large chunk of the weakest Carly Rae Jepsen tracks to date. Oh no.
Oh yes! “Anything To Be With You”’s opening vocal hook is an instant dud that unfolds as a piteously diffuse reggae-pop test of patience, while “Aeroplanes”’ deadweight chorus and off-putting slurry of a muted steel pan-jam never so much as dream of (sorry) getting off the ground. Later, the closing pair rounds the record off with all the conviction of a wet sock: “Stadium Love”’s insufferably bland homage to too-starstruck-for-taste maximalism brings to mind every word that Taylor Swift forced us to swallow way back when she dropped
1989 (now there’s an album with great B-sides!), not least because it does its utmost to regurgitate the same hooks; closer “Weekend Love”’s flimsy arrangement and structural centre of gravity are so weak that its very existence is practically in jeopardy.
B-side is too kind a label for these songs. They occupy a solid quarter of the album.
All is not gloom, and it is a crime to critique a Carly Rae Jepsen record without some measure of optimism in one’s heart, and so - yes, there are also a few solid tracks to be found here. “Put It To Rest”’s weave of fragile melodies exerts a tenacious grip with the force of its snare-heavy beat behind it, while “Come Over” provides a well-earned encore for the sleek sophisti-pop of
The Loneliest Time’s “Sideways”, and “Kollage” is a disarmingly flattering approximation of the mythical Faye Wong cover of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” that precisely none of us ever knew we needed. Jepsen’s voice finds perhaps its fullest range of guises to date, and while many of these are ill-fitting (refer back to that list of lowlights), it’s still a joy to hear her as exhilarated as on “After Last Night” or as elegant in her inflections as on “Shadow”.
These are nice perks - grab them, get out, and rearrange them into a more flattering shape alongside the rest of your #carlyfavs! They do little to provide shape to this warm-fuzzy-mess of a record, and it’s their subject matter alone sets them apart from
The Loneliest Time. While that album saw Carly focusing on the anxiety and hesitation that accompany burgeoning romance for someone who overthinks such matters as much as she’s made it her entire career to,
The Loveliest Time sees her plunging into full ecstasy and tumbling head-over-heels for the proverbial Shy Boy. This is a salient distinction, but it finds itself transcended by commonalities in her Weltanschauung - if
I get all my confidence from you was glass-half-empty and
Nothing really matters / but it matters if it matters to you is glass-half-full, then for the love of God, Carly Rae Jepsen needs to start frequenting a better bar. It’s hard (or rather naive) to pick holes in her concertedly wholesome slave-to-romance persona when it’s brought her such success as the pop star of choice for, among others, a broad cohort of very online men otherwise incapable of touching pop with a barge pole. It's testament both to the strength of her bangers and to her vocal charm that she's rendered however many reams' worth of obsequious POV date lyrics so frequently elating, and I am genuinely a huge admirer of how she's turned the veiled toxicity behind her naked lack of self-worth into a compelling source of pathos (sorry nerds, Max Landis was bang on the money here).
However, I’m not convinced that Jepsen holds either the same magic or the same unwavering narrative focus as when she blew up as the hipster-next-door’s favourite girl-next-door on
Emotion. She’s hardly been an unwelcome presence since then, but this mish-mash of stylistic feints and diminishing returns on tired lyrical standpoints suggests that the
Lo_eliest Time duo is less the full step forwards that many have billed it as, and more a confused shuffle in every and no direction at once. She stands in an apparent bog; she has now dropped a semi-surprise album for spontaneous hype, and practically none of the usual Major Sources have reviewed it at the time of writing (i.e. three days late). This review will undoubtedly be the one to save her, for all of her songs are about me and only me, and if you also believe that, then, well…
Don’t call me.
Maybe.
