Review Summary: Come on now, make it stop
Something marvellous happened to me whilst listening to
Timeless. Something I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do again after listening to music with an active critical ear for so long: I stopped caring. Just like that. Bang, gone, goodbye! Just so I’m clear, I don’t mean I stopped caring in the way Meghan Trainor wants me to stop caring, i.e: not being self-conscious that my abs are too firm or my biceps are too huge, but I mean, I REALLY stopped caring. I didn’t feel like nitpicking, assessing or being an insufferable elitist- I just listened to the music with no agenda. Unthinkable, I know. Now, I don’t want to make it seem like I’ve cracked the code per se, but I am almost positive that this is the key to fully appreciating the music of Meghan Trainor, and a great many other artists I probably will never listen to. No lie, during my listen Doug Bradley himself appeared in full Cenobite regalia and whisked me off to an alternate dimension where there was no such thing as critical appraisal- only pain. Once I had made peace with this uncomfortable new reality, I found the experience of
Timeless to be quite tolerable. The preoccupations of body positivity, self-confidence, feisty feminism and how curvaceous Trainor’s rear happens to be are things that most well-balanced individuals will be able to see the value in, and it’s difficult to see any real offence stemming from such topics. After coming back to reality with a thump and going beyond these admirable ides into the nuts and bolts of the album, though, I realised the unfiltered truth: the experience was underwhelming at best, and patience-proddingly irritating at worst.
Timeless is a definite step up from
Takin’ It Back, but weak songwriting, a lack of cohesion and unfortunate lyrical choices keep the genial focus way below the level it aspires to be. Back in the underworld with Pinhead where criticism is no object, to be specific.
First, a hot take: I like Meghan Trainor. She seems like a genuinely lovely person with a sunny disposition, and I’ve always found her atypical popstar image and vintage musical influence to be quite refreshing amidst the washed-out stereotypicality of the billboards. There are even moments on
Timeless where this identity really comes out and she manages to purvey admirable ideas with some degree of catchy gusto: ‘Forget How To Love’ has some pleasant vocal lines and, despite its simplicity, offers some amount of staying power. Similarly, ‘Love On Hold’ (minus the T-Pain cameo) and ‘Rollin’’ (Air Raid Vehicle) are generally catchy and innocuous enough to overcome how underdeveloped they are. Nevertheless, the main issue with the majority of the material here is that the low points on
Timeless are so aggressively subpar they actively drag the album’s above-waterline moments down to their level, and even manage to undermine them on a few occasions. For example, on multiple songs Trainor pontificates about just how voluptuous her ass is, selling that body-positivity angle that made her a household name back in 2014. Then, on ‘Whoops’, Trainor shames some anonymous woman by claiming that she is not as attractive as her, and is bereft of an ass. Whether it’s a misjudged jibe at a hypothetical individual or out-and-out hypocrisy, the contrast is jarring and casts doubt upon the character the singer has cultivated for herself over the years. Be it self-love, falling in love, falling out of love, or various other misadventures pertaining to love, the record doesn’t really have very much to say, making the sourness of the aforementioned lyrical barb exceedingly obvious and unpleasant in the extreme.
With ‘love’ being the core focus of
Timeless, there’s an extreme amount of redundancy on display during its 44 minute runtime, both musically and thematically. The doo-wop infrastructure charged with modern pop hallmarks make up the predominant style found on the record, and it’s consistent if nothing else. Single ‘Been Like This’ with T-Pain exhibits the worst of both worlds and is horribly reminiscent of will.i.am’s electro swing monstrosity ‘Bang Bang’ from 2013, minus the comparative dynamism of the chorus drop. It’s on moments like this that the glaring shortcomings with every aspect of the formula are highlighted; the saccharine lyrics, tasteless instrumentals and squeaky-clean production violently butting heads in a futile attempt to create some form of cohesion. Cuts like ‘Crushin’’, ‘I Wanna Thank Me’ and ‘Bestie’, cover almost identical self-congratulatory ground and really drive the idea of self-love into the mud, and not in diverse enough fashion to justify such repetition. ‘Crowded Room’, ‘I Get It’ and ‘Sleeping On Me’ are all pure filler and feel exceptionally bland even against the context of the rest of the album. ‘I Don’t Do Maybe’ and ‘Hate It Here’ have a slight edge thanks to the former’s mischievous brass instrumentation and the latter’s friskier lyricism, but both suffer from distracting production choices and uninteresting hooks. Much like the rest of Trainor’s output there’s no real sense of direction, only an abstract that encompasses an expected musical style and topicality. These rigid guidelines are adhered to so religiously that not a single aspect impresses or offers anything beyond a fleeting, toe-tapping distraction.
It’s doubtful anyone was toiling under the impression that
Timeless was going to mark a bold stylistic shift for Trainor, and in spite of its more irritating qualities, it does mark something of a step up in terms of quality from her more recent output. However, this quality is entirely dependent on how much of your brain you’re willing to check at the door, with anything less than a full lobotomy likely resulting in a vexing experience. The formula that Trainor peddles is little more than a novelty, but that doesn’t mean that it’s of no value; it could certainly be wheeled out on occasion to diversify a release’s content- but not for an entire album’s worth of material. Much less five album lengths. There are vague attempts at tinkering with the sound in an effort to prevent the uniformity from getting stale, such as leaning more into the contemporary side of her sound, but so at loggerheads are the individual components of the LP in general terms it’s a losing battle from the second it starts. The issue is made all the more frustrating by the fact there are incredibly brief flashes of songwriting prowess in here, but much like everything else Trainor has released, they're obscured by gimmicky production and an absolute checkmate of a genre trademark that doesn’t allow her to evolve so much as enthusiastically flail around within an incredibly confined stylistic space. It’s inoffensive, lighthearted and bubbly, but offers nothing in the way of surprises or excitement. Remember in 2014 when Trainor told us all that she’d never learned to cook, but she could write a hook? Culinary school’s a-callin’, Meg.
