Review Summary: Sometimes, the sauce is lost to us.
There is something intriguing about good artists releasing bad albums. By bad albums, I do not mean bold and worthy experiments that do not come off. I mean an album like this one in which an artist who began her career with the striking and engrossing
Pure Heroine and
Melodrama cannot
hear that what is hitting the tape just does not do the lyrics any favours.
Lorde makes so many bad creative decisions across these 11 songs. And I do mean
bad. Not just
new or
old or
against my taste but head-scratchers that just feel like dead-ends. The beats are hookless synths, as if producer Jim-E Stack kept dialling the sound down to not overwhelm the sung-spoken vocal performances. The unmelodious singing is bizarre. Seemingly paralysed by the approach that authentic lyrics cannot live side-by-side with hummable music, Lorde nixes all build and release dynamics from these songs.
A song starts. We hear the chord cycle. If you don’t like it within thirty seconds, you might as well skip and try your luck with the next one.
There are moments where the journey of self-exploration is canvassed in stories that hold us to the end but at worst, the lyrics are reaching for something that critics could quickly dash off in their review as “open, raw, honest, personal” and call it a day. That Lorde has already recorded a momentous pop album with the overarching concept of laying herself bare, warts and all, as a hot mess looking for a sense of self makes
Virgin and its unlovable clunkiness even harder to understand.
Album opener ‘Hammer’ has us clutching pearls and whip-smart tuned in with its opening line, “There’s a heat in the pavement, my mercury’s rising/Don’t know if it’s love or if it’s ovulation.” Whether you find that icky or engaging, it is Lorde introducing us directly to the biggest theme of
Virgin, one which makes the title choice abundantly clear: sex and Lorde’s feelings of sex being a cat-and-mouse game between the exploiter and the exploited, something to which she is magnetically drawn regardless of how vulnerable, scared, remorseful and joyless she feels throughout the transaction.
‘Clearblue’ walks us painstakingly through Lorde taking a pregnancy test and preparing herself for a positive reading before dealing with the mixed feelings of relief and let-down when just the one line appears on the titular test. The track is unblinking, an acapella recording with only layered harmonies standing at Lorde’s shoulder. This is my favourite song on the album because it explores an experience that is both emotionally confronting and borderline unheard of in popular music.
It is also the only time on the album where the music actually matches the scraping discomfort of Lorde’s lyrics… because it is respectfully not there. Perhaps this is the greatest failure of
Virgin: the listening experience rarely feels like a deeply personal one-on-one where we feel the pain and toll of its creator. More often, it feels like standing in a circle at a party while a friend of a friend monologues on and on about what they’re going through and everyone else is furtively making eye contact, telepathically agreeing that this is a TMI situation that we could get out of if we all slunk off at once. Two songs later, ‘Broken Glass’ is busy enshrouding its lyric of an eating disorder with a stupidly cheesy synth hook.
It almost feels mean to slam an artist who put so much mental and physical pain into her lyrics only to have it come a cropper because nothing else worked in the process. There will be plenty of discussion about the rooms Lorde turned upside down to make these songs and part of it will be praise for her preparedness to make herself vulnerable in topics beyond that which we generically accept as vulnerable.
Could she have come up with a better lyric to describe that uncertainty than, “You tasted my underwear/I knew we were f***ed” on ‘Current Affairs’? Once upon a time, yes. And hopefully once again someday soon. But not on
Virgin.
