Review Summary: Better saved as drafts.
How much does Internet gossip, drama and assumptions shape our musical expectations? Having heard ‘because i liked a boy’ months ago, I tried to avoid this album for as long as I could. Not because that one song was bad and I thought the rest would be of the same quality -the song was actually good- but because I feared that the record would have the whole Carpenter-Bassett-Rodrigo young-relationship drama that unfolded two years ago looming over it. Basically, I feared that this would be a sort of
response album to that mess and that the music would be some belated afterthought. Thankfully, Sabrina ended up saving her response to the drama for that fifth track. Unfortunately, I was right to fear listening to this record, as the dynamic nature of ‘because i liked a boy’ is a rare instance here.
emails i can’t send is, most of all, suffering from an identity crisis. Undecided about whether it wants to be a dance-pop affair or a collection of acoustic and singer-songwriter tracks, it jumps sounds too frequently and too inconsistently. ‘Read Your Mind’ is a sleek and tasteful disco-driven tune about struggling to deal with your partner’s indecisiveness and it's boundlessly fun. Yet it finds itself sandwiched between ‘Vicious’, a run-of-the-mill power-pop rant to a toxic partner and ‘Tornado Warnings’, a forgettable pop-rock cut that dismisses Sabrina’s vocal presence for a spoken-verse experiment. Both of these tracks make the bouncy 'Read Your Mind' feel like a freak accident.
Even when Sabrina gets it right, the tonal shifts on this record betray their enjoyability. Take 'how many things'; an admittedly lovely acoustic cut that, disregarding a few eye-rolling lyrics (“You used a fork once / It turns out forks are f
ucking everywhere”), sounds destined for a hushed folk-pop project that never came into fruition. The fan-favorite 'Nonsense' sounds like Sabrina jammed
Positions a little too much and caught a whiff of inspiration. It is lyrically cheeky, wears its Ariana Grande influence proudly on its sleeve and, above all, perfectly decent. Still, its upbeat R&B feel sticks out like a sore thumb, since it's surrounded by different sonic territory.
I'm not saying that an album cannot have wildly different sounds, genres and tones while also working as a cohesive whole. But I am saying that Sabrina lacks the songwriting skills and sheer force of will to make that concept work. Her writing is fairly by-the-numbers, yet a vast improvement from previous output and sometimes manages to find power in detail and humor, with the writing on ‘because i liked a boy’ being her biggest triumph (“Dating boys with exes / No, I wouldn’t recommend it”, for example, is an admittedly funny quip). Her vocal performance seesaws in quality, either being captivating or coming across like wallpaper (‘Bad for Business’ could be literally sung by anyone), with some spoken-passages and Ariana/Camila-esque vocal inflections sprinkled throughout. The production is mostly polished, but that too tends to be either detailed and punchy or just uneventful and bland.
Worse of all,
emails i can’t send would maybe fare better if the sequencing was different, putting the slower, pop-rock-oriented songs first and gradually moving towards the dancefloor-ready ones. Or better yet, replacing forgettable detours with far more superior material from the deluxe edition of the album. 'Feather' is a lyrically silly yet funky nu-disco number that is much more successful at the levity its other dance tracks, like the drab 'Already Over', try to achieve. 'Lonesome' features a lovely and rich country-pop instrumentation light years away from other sprawling tracks like ‘decode’. Slip these tracks in the official edition and we would be dealing with a different beast.
As it stands, the album is an enjoyable yet unfocused whole, carried by Sabrina’s ambition to push her talents forward and some noteworthy highs, like the aforementioned ‘Read Your Mind’, the tense dark-pop of ‘bet u wanna’ and the aching ‘because i liked a boy’, as well as the near-perfect 'Lonesome'. However,
emails i can’t send is very slapped together, in its sequencing and songwriting choices. There’s ample talent present throughout, talent that could rival pop giants, but you have to give in to the slugginess and monotone it tends to also exhibit.
