Review Summary: music is wow
A year on from release, Charli XCX’s
brat remains the greatest pop album of the decade. If not in quality, certainly in impact: its blunt, terse proclamations were boiled out of decade-plus long simmer of someone experiencing heartbreak, loss, stagnation, and failure; so when the “Boom Clap” girl wondered aloud why she wants to buy a gun and shoot herself or contemplate going off her birth control before threateningly asking to do more lines of coke, there was an awful lot to unpack and the stakes felt lived in. Still, while the thematic resonance was powerful and the secret sauce to its stratospheric heights, it was all secondary to the fact that every song fell into a neat binary of being a banger or tearjerker off aesthetics alone. Crucial to its success as a phenomenon was the fact that
brat was bigger than just Charli: it was a fleeting, ineffable attitude. Hypothetically, anyone could have harnessed the
brat-like energy for a
brat-like movement.
That theory is put to the test with Addison Rae’s
Addison. A close collaborator on
brat and the beneficiary of Charli XCX’s drive to play queenmaker (we hardly knew ye, Nasty Cherry), Addison’s standing in the shadow of
brat less as a result of someone eyeing the nachos in the fridge and more from Charli dragging her into the light.
Addison is capital-H, capital-G Hot Girl music that takes the aim of
brat but shifts the focus to the trials and tribulations of a newly minted star in their early twenties. The results are frustratingly… good. That frustration comes not out of some vendetta against Addison*, but rather that the album is so enticing and alluring on first blush that it’s disappointing when it ultimately settles short of its lofty ambitions with a noble pursuit.
*
Though she is much maligned for her initial Tonight Show appearance, I maintain that the worst part of any Jimmy Fallon clip is and always will be Jimmy Fallon.
Addison knocks it out of the park where you would expect it (“New York” is a slam-dunk impression of Charli’s auto-tuned mantras; “Diet Pepsi” is a perfect song, and hits Lana Del Rey’s poppier side better than Lana ever could), but it’s shocking just how varied and adventurous its other victories are. “Aquamarine” is a stunning, hypnotic eurodance track that playfully toys with its airy ooh’s and whisper-singing to create a dazzling, ever-escalating sense of wonder. That there exists an Arca-produced remix entitled
Arcamarine should illustrate what level everyone involved was cooking with, but that’s peanuts compared to the weirdness of the album’s true towering achievement, “High Fashion.” Its buzzsaw synths wane and swell in an uneasy rhythm that legitimately call to mind Radiohead’s forays into IDM, while Addison alternates between haunting and hilarious (“You know I’m not an easy f
uck/but when it comes to shoes, I’ll be a slut” is delivered with enough deadpan conviction to make you briefly forget how goofy it absolutely is). “Headphones On” ends the album on a surprisingly tender note with an ode to Addison’s love of music and her drive to keep moving forward on a lowkey new jack swing beat. There can be no doubt that Addison is capable of genuine pop perfection.
The problem, then, isn’t potential: it’s consistency. What surrounds the aforementioned high points are songs and interludes that don’t amount to anything and simply aren’t interesting enough to justify their place in an album that just eeks out a half-hour runtime. “Summer Forever” is another Lana attempt that drowns in its influence, while “Money is Everything” is an obnoxious time machine back to when Kesha had a dollar sign in her name (though, to the song’s credit, the group vocals are more rousing than anything A Day to Remember has put out in a decade). “In the Rain” and “Times Like These” are both anchored by textured production but fail to put forth anything to stick out from the haze, and nothing of consequence would be lost by eliminating the interludes (“Lost & Found”, “Life’s No Fun Through Clear Waters”) entirely. The creative team (Rae herself, Elvira Anderfjard, Luka Kloser) is the same across the board so as to ensure that the peaks were no accident, but it remains odd that so much of the album’s brief runtime wallows in the same sort of vapid nothingness that the high points successfully subvert.
Addison starts off “Fame is a Gun” with a command and a question: “Tell me who I am/Do I provoke you with my tone of innocence?” It’s an incredibly silly pair of lines that rattle off like a poor fan translation of an anime, but they might as well serve as the mission statement for Rae’s metamorphosis as an artist. She’s at her best when she ups the ante, be it exposed nerves (“I need a cigarette to make me feel better”) or painterly attraction (“I’d rather feel the sun kissed on my skin/with a cigarette pressed between my tits”). It’s exciting to witness a new star come into their own, and there is enough greatness here to remove any sort of qualifier from judging Addison on her own artist merits. While
Addison isn’t the essential listen that it clearly wants to be, it’s an intriguing start to a career that just might one day get there.
