it’s alright. There are parts that draw me in, but then it keeps going and repeating and it loses me. There will be places where in my head I think, “ah, now a bridge to shake up the chords or at least the melody!” and it will just keep looping the main beat. There’s too much of the type of generic pop-production decision making that turns something I would otherwise be super willing to like into something that just feels boring and long.
Heartbeat (新的心跳, literally new heartbeat, not sure why that just got nixed in translation), a few albums in, marks pretty good movement in the right direction, but it’s not quite substantial enough and it kinda wears off, I think. The albums after Heartbeat are better than the ones before, for sure, but they’re still not great, and for a reason I can’t quite place I don’t think they’re as good as Heartbeat. Not that I love Heartbeat, I don’t know I’d even say I fully like it as an album, but it’s closer to that than the rest.
The thing that might be the most frustrating hear, fairly or not, is that I think her singles are consistently way better than the songs she has in albums. I never like it when this happens, but it does happen. Something about her albums makes all the songs’ individuality wash away for me. That said, that bump up doesn’t do a ton, among the singles and eps there are still very few songs that I like enough to want to listen to enough to add to my main playlist.
It’s fine, it’s fine enough. I don’t have much to critique it for. It just never landed for me, there was never anything that stood out to me and it was so easy for it become a hazy blur in my ears. Maybe that will change, but I suspect this time it won’t. This isn’t the type of thing I’d expect to like with more listens. It doesn’t offend me at all, but it doesn’t give me much cause to like it, so a high D+ feels appropriate
RELISTEN1: I definitely like her more than I did at first, but I also think my main complaints have stayed the same. She’s put out a lot of stuff, and the general level of quality is decent, but especially when listening to it all at once tends to blur together more than it tends to work together. I find her albums don’t work very well for me as albums, which is a huge bummer. The songs I do like have grown on me a lot, such that they’ve gone from “yeah I like it alright” to “yeah this song’s actually kinda great”. Maybe still not my favorite songs, but it’s good respectable pop. Just, on the individual song scale, multiplied by a large lifetime quantity, and not really by anything more than that.
Revisiting the specific things I said the first time. I definitely don’t feel like Heartbeat is some significant turning point anymore. I think she generally gets better with time, but I think all of her albums are within the same type of range, no real outliers. I think her singles do have a higher proportion of songs I like, but I don’t know that I actually think it’s that significant. My overall conclusion from this relisten is that I wasn’t wrong in my observations the first go around, but I might’ve been a little too harsh. This definitely feels more to me like a B than a D, and not even really that low of a B. Pretty solid
tunafruitsandwitch 