Rina Sawayama has superstar ambition and a knack for clever genre collisions. But while her new album sometimes matches intensity with innovation, it more often grinds her nuanced story to a paste.
."Hurricanes" is theater-kid"Sk8er Boi." Many of these songs feel rigid with intention, as if they were envisaged as set pieces for a spectacular live show. The glitchy, towering"Hold the Girl" has a sentimental outro of gauzy atmospherics, pounding drums and a consecutive one-two of the album's many, many key changes that invites you to picture a gymnastics duo reducing cold-hearted judges to tears with a moving athletic spectacular.
The problem is less that Sawayama is drawing from so-called bad-taste sources than the fact that the disparate parts often feel like flavor profiles that don't mix. The final song,"To Be Alive," bridles fist-to-chest triumph to a racing breakbeat, dry, funky guitar, and Sawayama's processed voice affirming the Insta caption homily:"Flowers still look pretty when they're dying.
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