I miss there being huge comebacks in the music industry. Sure, there's the typical story of the legend who made a clunker of an album and whose commercial success fell in correlation to their age rising (or the veteran who takes time off to live, love, and learn only to pick right back up where they left off), but very rarely do we hear about an artist who didn't sell a lot of records the first time around, takes more than half a decade off, and comes back to gangbuster results.
That's exactly what Fefe Dobson is trying to accomplish. After trying to catch fire at the tail end of Avril Lavigne's initial success, Dobson failed to ignite on the charts and went back to the drawing board, only to be dropped by Island/Def Jam shortly before the release of her now-shelved second album. Most artists would then go the indie route and tour a lot on their own dime, but not our Fefe. After gaining some momentum through song placements and co-writes, Dobson resigned with Island/Def Jam, culminating in her second official release in late November.
Can't Breathe is an interesting listen, only in the sense that it's one of the truer ballads on the record and it's very vocal. I thought it would hate the song once the Ryan Tedder-y Wall of Sound elements started to hit, but you know what? It's pretty stunning. This doesn't reinvent the wheel lyrically, but with a melody as taut as this one is and as heartfelt a performance as Dobson gives, it's definitely forgivable. I could have even done with the superfluous electric guitar solo, which is saying something when Dobson's first album was at its best when she blew the windows off. If the album gets another single, this is the best of the lot. I'm a Lady almost made me squeal when I first listened to the album all the way through because it's exactly what Dobson should be doing. While I believe her on dance music, she just shines on the gruffer rock tracks. This jangly Jet sound-a-like has the type of delirious confidence and strut that Fefe is capable of doing, only this time it's for the entire song and it's pretty flawlessly executed. It's kind of the best of both worlds, as she gets the tempo and attitude of a dance diva but instead of throbbing synths, she has some nice driving guitars and pounding percussion. It's a well produced slice of retro rock that only hints at the inner rockstar that Dobson lets peek through now and then. You B!tch should have hit harder than it does. When I read the title, I thought it would be this brawler of an uptempo where Dobson gets to explore her punk side. What I got is a Hilary Duff song set to guitars, more or less. Seriously, the plastic-y verses sound like someone took a scratch vocal from a past Duff album (Dobson sounds exactly like her, to beat it all, which is eerie) and just shellacked it with guitars. The hook is terribly limp and doesn't take advantage of any of Fefe's inherent attitude, which should have been on full blast here. If you're going to call a track what Fefe did, go big or go home and unfortunately she was halfway out the door before the :30 mark.
Album closer Joy has a decidedly 60s campfire vibe until the genuinely perplexing chorus mixes some gospel lyrics with a come-on or two. It feels less like an artistic choice and more like a calculated "aren't I quirky? *grin*" type of attention getting that's not attractive in the slightest. Dobson is a talented woman who knows her way around a pen, but the decisions she makes about how to present herself are confusing to say the least. I buy this daydreamer anthem for the most part, especially because the melody is beyond infectious, but the sample just ruins everything. Thanks for Nothing sounds almost uncannily like Since U Been Gone; I mean, there are certainly much worse songs to aspire to sound like, but it's such a close mirroring that it's almost distracting. Taken on its own, it's an explosive kiss off that is probably a rough little rocker underneath the production, but combine the uninspired structure (sparse guitar licks fading into a revving drum kick and eventually a booming chorus) and the invasive production and you have a really bland listen. It's got enough to it where it should be the highlight of the record, but it's the biggest example of the record's anonymity. Ghost coming from any of Fefe's contemporaries would have infuriated me to no end. Here we have a "rocker chick" doing decidedly 80s dance music with crunchy keyboards and a blippy bassline? But considering the material that leaked from her shelved album Sunday Love, this isn't a surprising listen nor is it half bad. Edging closer to new wave than a typical dance floor filler, Ghost is one of the better written songs on the record, eschewing the type of snarly attitude that can appear on a Fefe song for a defiant independence that is ultimately quite freeing.
The main problem that I have with Fefe Dobson's second album is that fact that any one of her peers could have sang this and I wouldn't have noticed. That's not taking anything away from Fefe; she's a solid performer with vocal chops and a decent amount of presence. There's just nothing about these songs that screams THIS IS A FEFE DOBSON RECORD, which probably explains the lack of a single gaining a foothold in the United States. I understand that this is only her second album, but she's been in the industry for about 7-8 years, so there's been ample enough time to figure out who the heck she actually is and how she wants to present herself. I know this sounds like I hated the record (I think it's uneven and the stuff that's good is wonderful), but there's so much potential there that it's frustrating for Fefe to not fully develop a personality in her time out of the mainstream media. Until she realizes that she's not the punk-y love child of Kelly Clarkson and Pink, I don't see anybody ever paying attention to Fefe, which is too bad because this b!tch has only just begun to scratch the surface.
0 comments:
Post a Comment