Run Away With Me – Pure pop gold. I love the reverb and echo effects done on Carly’s voice. This just makes me want to take my hands off the wheel, throw them in the air, careen straight into a tree, and kill myself. My favorite lyric is, “I’ll be your sinner in secret / when the lights go out.” So playful and flirtatious.
Emotion – Sounds exactly like a Haim track. Gotta love it. I’m glad that Carly Rae Jepsen is reaching out and ripping off a wider variety of artists now than she was earlier in her career. Riding on suggestive lyrics about fantasies and tequila and inappropriately seeing women in one’s dreams, this clearly isn’t the same young and innocent Carly Rae Jepsen who stole our hearts with It’s Always a Good Time and Call Me Maybe.
I Really (Really, Really, Really, Really, Really) Like You – Hands down the best pop single since Shake It Off. So catchy, with a chorus that’s instantly relatable to anyone who’s ever fallen in love or tricked themselves into thinking that they’ve fallen in love with someone to whom they are merely sexually attracted. I love it when she says, “All I want to do is get into your head,” cleverly rhyming with red, like the color of her lips.
Gimmie Love – Obviously a reference to the late and legendary Biggie, Carly further pushes the boundaries by dropping a PG word (“whole damn night”) in the second verse. This one grew on me more slowly than the rest, but after I listened through the album for the 11th time straight, I appreciated the simplicity of the repeating title in the chorus and the looping electronic bass line.
All That – A synthy, slow-paced throwback to the very best of easy listening. Gives Thinking Out Loud a run for its money as the most touching and irresistible love song of the 2010s. Make sure to listen alongside a muted torrent of
Dirty Dancing or
Grease for maximum impact.
Boy Problems – Listen up, girls. This one’s for you. Carly sings about how she just broke up with her boyfriend, but like Demi Lovatory, she doesn’t really care because she’s just got worse problems. With an inspiring message about not defining yourself through men, this is necessary listening for girls who are going through those difficult, confusing tween years and don’t know what the heck is happening to their faces.
Making the Most of the Night – “Here I’ve come to hijack you,” belts Carly on the most seductive and blissful song of the album, which is an obvious innuendo referring to other female pop stars like Taylor Swift. Insane production values and mixing make this a standout track in Jepsen’s catalog.
Your Type – Oh, the woes of being in the friendzone! There’s a common misconception that only guys get friend-ed because girls can get sex whenever and with whomever they want (FEMINISM 101: umm, that’s totally not true), so it’s reassuring to see a major pop artist singing about this dreaded relationship stumbling block from a female perspective. This reminds me of T. Swift’s You Belong With Me in all the right ways.
Let’s Got Lost – “I never wanted to discourage everything / your eyes encouraged silently.” Beautiful and sugary with a sexy saxophone section entering over the bridge. It’s good to know that Carly Rae Jepsen appreciates the sophistication of smooth jazz. Remember
Whiplash? That was such a kick-ass movie!
LA Hallucinations – Sounds like a hip-hop-infused mashup of twenty different artists in one, but still a distinctively C-Ray song. She even manages to work in a stinging jab at “Buzzfeed buzzards and TMZ crows”, which is just one of 22 reasons I love Carly Rae Jepsen.
Warm Blood – If Banks’ Warm Water and Taylor Swift’s Bad Blood were combined into one super-song, it would sound like Carly Rae Jepsen’s Warm Blood. Probably the most experimental and progressive song she’s recorded, which is a good thing. Many Carly Rae Jepsen fans don’t like it because it sounds so different from the style featured on her first album and her second album, but artists need to evolve artistically and we should support any traditional pop musician who has the courage to try new and different things like electronic pop music. How could Kanye have made the auto-tuney, electro masterpiece
808s and Heartbreak if he didn’t first make the leap to break away from the stale, classic-sounding rap beats that dominated
The College Dropout?
When I Needed You – Well, this is it. We made it to the end. I mean this is amazing! Really sends the album out with a gunshot, that is a bang.
If you like weird, boring indie music by stuffy, overrated art musicians like Bjork, Led Zeppelin, Arctic Monkeys, Fiona Apple, Massive Attack, The Strokes, Jack White, The xx, Spoon, or Radiohead (ugh, I can’t stand those guys), you probably won’t like
E·MO·TION by Carly Rae Jepsen. If you just don’t get any of those people and like your basic Top 40 pop music as Basic as it can be, you’ll probably love this album. Carly Rae Jepsen isn’t a little girl anymore, and she’s here to prove that she can run with the best of them.
And the Author’s arbitrary rating is...
9.37 out of 10. Eminently shallow but listenable pop music, unlike Kelly Clarkson, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, etc. etc. excruciating hacks that you hear on the radio. It ain’t Radiohead or U2 or Velvet Underground or some depressing fare like that, but it’s fairly fun for the flimsy stuff it is.
9.37 eh? I am sitting at my work desk and my speakers work terribly, so I won't try to listen to the song right this second. I hope I can remember to come back and do it tonight.
ReplyDeleteYou really shouldn't. It's just silly, mainstream pop music they spat out of a factory machine. It'd definitely get a 5.23 if Dom Forke was grading it on the same scale as any of those other artists he mentioned.
DeleteOh, I forgot to ask about the Planned Parenthood videos. They truly are disturbing to me. Would a new president be able to go back and make abortion illegal again? I am confused about how that could happen. Can you explain it to me in a very basic way. Imagine you are speaking to a 5th grader. : ) I think that is the only way I can understand you.
ReplyDeleteI don't think the president could because the Supremes have ruled twice that quote unquote abortion is a quote unquote Human Right. That hasn't stopped presidents in the past from issuing orders contrary to the Constitution as imagined by SCOTUS, but it is a major impediment and I doubt any of these candidates would go that far. The only really viable ways to fight abortion at the federal level are for Congress to pass a law sending the issue back to the Supremes or for federal and state governments to pass a constitutional amendment nullifying the amendment that Roe V. Wade artificially scribbled into the law, but neither of those things is going to happen. The most we can do at this point is strip away all taxpayer support for butcher shops like Planned Parenthood and force them to take their natural course, wherever that may lead.
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