Trainor adds twist to doo-wop style
Meghan Trainor is back with that doo-wop style of music that made her famous, but this time adding a twist to it.
Her new album, “Takin’ It Back,” isn’t your usual journey of self-love; this is a more mature Trainor — riding the ups and downs we all secretly experience, moments of bursting confidence to self-doubt and sadness with a sprinkle of reassuring reality.
Like in her single
“Don’t I Make It Look Easy,” Meghan talks about filtering the truth and showing the best part of herself to the world, even when it just feels like a straight out lie.
Since her last album, Trainor has done some growth of her own, getting married and becoming a mom, and she’s imparting all that she learned on the way. Beginning to end, this album feels like a therapy session, and with her lyrics, Trainor is holding the mirror to our fears as well as being a wise voice in the cloudy rainy days.
Don’t get me wrong.
Like in life, this album is not just slow songs about self-reflection, but it’s an uplifting fun experience.
Like in the single “Made You Look,” where a loud and sexier Trainor sings “I could wear my Louis Vuitton, but even with nothin’ on, bet I made you look.” The music video is a family affair, featuring the singer’s best friend and TikToker Chris Olsen and former “Spy Kids” actor and her husband, Daryl Sabara.
Moreover, Trainor experiments through different music genres, like in the track “Mama Wanna Mambo.” Featuring Dominican singer
Natti Natasha and Cuban American musician Arturo Sandoval, it’s sure to raise your dancing fever.
In the 12th track “While You’re Young,” Trainor’s lyrics feel like that familiar voice in our head we
always ignore, sometimes even involuntarily.
She tries to shake all the worries away and asks us to be more vulnerable. “You’ve only just begun and you’re good enough/ And I know it doesn’t help with the pain, but have you ever tried to dance in the rain?/ You’re not the only one who’s feelin’ this way.”
The album ends with the slow song “Final Breath,” which brings you back to the center of your emotions just like the best therapy session would do — right before sending you out into the real world.
Meghan sings, “If I could, I’d do it all over again,” and as you end this fluctuation of genres and feelings, you feel reassured that you are not going through all of this alone. — Martina Inchingolo, Associated Press
Femininity is all-encompassing,
it’s malleable and flesh deep. In Tove Lo’s fifth studio album, “Dirt Femme” — the first under her independent label — the Swedish singersongwriter and producer profoundly understands the female experience can be painful, messy and iridescent. Tove Lo rejects the confined cage of femininity and gets dirty.
In “Dirt Femme,” Tove Lo is able to analyze her marriage and rejects the traditional nuclear family in “Suburbia,” singing “I can’t be no Stepford wife.” She explores an eating
disorder that plagued her teenage years in “Grapefruit” — the purposefully sweltering beats make this song a deniable club banger — and self-hatred and self-sabotage in “I’m to Blame,” her most candid song yet.
Lead single “No One Dies from Love” documents how Tove Lo’s interpretation of femininity means showing the vulnerability of heartbreak as she sings against heavy ’80s-inspired synth, “No one dies from love/ Guess I’ll be the first. Will you remember us?/ Or are the memories too stained with blood now?” Her second single, “2 Die 4,” samples “Popcorn” by Gershon Kingsley in a shimmering, fatal love song that screams camp.
Other album standouts include “Call on Me” and “Pineapple Slice,” produced by British EDM artist SG Lewis. The songs take the listener into a disco rave curated by two juggernauts of the now mainstream genre.
Tove Lo ponders the question, “After the pain is there more?” She confidently answers it through a sharply written and a sonically creative career-defining album. She shatters the pristine image of femininity shoved down her throat as a woman. She is an artist — and now a independent label owner — while simultaneously dancing on the club floor.