Review Summary: One of the albums of all time.
Meghan Trainor refuses to go the f*ck away. It's hard to believe it's already been a decade since she brought "booty back" with her lilac-stenched smash "All About That Bass." Aside from the handful of uncritical drones who welcomed it into the 2014 pop environs with open arms, the song (and Trainor as an artist by proxy) was smoked out on impact for its empty platitudes, cheap and artificial throwback vibes, and Trainor's tone-deaf vocal affectations. Ten years and five albums later, Trainor is still doing the same damn thing. She's still pandering to unflattering doo wop revivalism, with even less personality than some of her hostile and decadent radio hits ("Bass", "Dear Future Husband").
Timeless, her hilariously titled latest outing, doesn't even have that going for it.
Trainor, whose voice is unspectacular on a good day, continues to do her best blackvoice while she weaves sleazy passages of snobbish, self-aggrandizing fluff, like on "Been Like This," the album's commercial flop of a lead single. She still wants to make this saxophone-heavy big band flavor of dance-pop a thing, even though her persona as an artist is one that's so unlikable, you doubt she can actually be chuffed to say anything of substance. The best she can muster when she's not giving herself a tongue bath is ditzy surface-level romantic proclivity, like on "Crowded Room," which suffers from putrid songwriting and no sense of melody or structure. Hot on its heels is "Whoops" (which should be the title of her biopic), where Trainor fails to spit fire at an unfaithful muse but succeeds admirably at body-shaming the mistress who drove a wedge between them. "She got 'bout half of my looks with no class," our Sleigh Kween sneers before the track vaults into another dimension of comical self-importance via a
key change. Leave that to the legends, Meg (Backstreet Boys, Whitney), you're not that b*tch. Elsewhere, Trainor does her best rip-off of Miley Cyrus' "Flowers" ("Crushin'") and plagiarizes the ideas and hook of her own hit "Like I'm Gonna Lose You" on the closing title cut.
Timeless is a forgettable and sloppy collection of repetitive tropes, less-than-half-baked ideas, unremarkable and even unsettling vocals, and robotic compositions and production that try to be a lot sweeter and vivacious than they actually are. It's reassuring, though, that the general public has all but completely rejected Trainor as a fixture in the pop zeitgeist. For the six people out there who were on pins and needles waiting for this one to drop, fear not; this album is painstakingly similar to all of its predecessors, so you can rest assured that there are no risks and no surprises. For an album called
Timeless, Trainor sure does seem trapped in 2014. If only we could have actually left her there.
