On GUTS, Olivia Rodrigo Embraces Her Imperfections and Sharpens Her Sound: Review
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The post On GUTS, Olivia Rodrigo Embraces Her Imperfections and Sharpens Her Sound: Review appeared first on Consequence.
Two and a half years after she sang earnestly about love lost on “driver’s license,” Olivia Rodrigo is now claiming that “love is fucking embarrassing.”
The declaration arrives on the aptly-titled “love is embarrassing,” a standout track from her sophomore LP, GUTS. Rodrigo explains her romantic reevaluation in the line, “Just watch as I crucify myself/ For some weird second string loser who’s not worth mentioning.” There’s plenty to extract about Rodrigo’s songwriting in just this single line: “Crucify” is her verb of choice (very dramatic), “Weird second string loser” is how she describes her crush (genuinely funny), the chorus it lands in is full of bright guitars and a motorik, New Wave-style beat (very “my parents are Gen X” of her).
And yet, despite her sounding like she’s totally over it, she reminds the listener that she “keeps coming back for more,” and the cycle of unreliable dudes and self-deprecation continues. This is a significant theme in GUTS as a whole: Now 20 years old, Rodrigo can interrogate her own habits and attitudes in a much more comprehensive way than on her debut album, SOUR. In other words, if SOUR was her high school album, then GUTS is her “college” album — except she’s not in college, and instead is a pored-over pop star with an ever expanding, occasionally encroaching audience.
But growing up — even and perhaps especially in the spotlight — allows for the kind of messiness that her debut album could not exactly wield. Now, Rodrigo snarls, shouts, and seethes; she opens the album by proclaiming she’s a “perfect all-American bitch,” she wants to “curl up and die” because she doesn’t deem herself to be socially savvy on “ballad of a homeschooled girl,” and she rails against beauty standards and her own personal issues with body image on tracks like “pretty isn’t pretty.”
Then there are the relationship-oriented tracks, which are even more fraught and calamitous than on SOUR. There are fun ones, like the cheeky power pop number “bad idea right?”, where Rodrigo makes a hedonistic reunion with a former lover intoxicating and rousing; or “get him back!,” which finds her shouting for the return of a past fling with a playboy and is best summed up by the line, “I wanna key his car/ I wanna make him lunch.” Meanwhile, “logical,” as well as lead single “vampire,” find Rodrigo taking out her righteous fury towards an ex, the pain of the experience still fresh, wounds slowly turning into scars.
Anger is certainly a driving emotion on GUTS. Rodrigo is determined to turn the anguish that made SOUR so cathartic into something even more active; in doing so, she confronts all the ways in which she feels inadequate, and points a doubled-edged finger back at both the shitty men in her life and herself for making her feel that way in the first place.
Sonically, there’s a deeper emphasis on the pop punk and alternative rock that characterized SOUR cuts “good 4 u” and “brutal,” to the point where it’s clear Rodrigo and producer Dan Nigro insisted on this album sounding loud and gigantic. Her voice, versatile and quite often beaming with clarity, is treated with more atmosphere than her previous record, with Rodrigo’s physical performance of these songs becoming inseparable from the final product. Rodrigo claims that two of her current mentors are Kathleen Hanna and Jack White; she channels both on GUTS, evoking their frenetic urgency and chaotic spirit while occasionally fashioning herself as the rebirth of a ’90s/early 2000s pop-rock superstar.
Of course, as evident in her first album and her previous Disney TV projects, there is a theater kid inside of Olivia Rodrigo that cannot and will not be tamed. “logical” feels tailor-made for a Broadway musical’s second act, her escalating dynamics throttled with power and bewilderment, delivered as if she’s experiencing this breakthrough for the very first time. She conjures both Glee and Freaky Friday-era pop rock on “bad idea right?”; the washes of “blah blah blah” harmonies and her shout-along chorus feel like they’re bratty backup singers, and Rodrigo takes her wandering solo number to the center stage.
As far as sophomore albums go, GUTS has quite a lot in common with another heartbreak-fueled pop record with a similar amount of unabashed emotion: Lorde’s Melodrama. Like Rodrigo, Lorde responded to a significant increase in exposure by turning the mirror inwards, and lamented her role in her own misfortune; all the while, she used the framework of early adulthood hedonism as a conduit to both self-hatred and self-discovery. But while Melodrama ended with a note of liberation, Rodrigo concludes GUTS with doubt: “They say that it gets better/ It gets better, but what if I don’t?”, she asks in the final refrain of “teenage dream.”
It’s a fitting way to end, especially given how direct and immediate Rodrigo’s songwriting is. The new level of expectation is weighing heavily on her, and her dissatisfaction is palpable. She spends a significant amount of the album exploring her feelings of inadequacy, just to land back on the idea that she can’t make everybody happy and is, frankly, “not enough.” It’s this kind of honesty that propels Rodrigo and wraps her legion of fans into her orbit, and her insistence on writing from this place is certainly refreshing.
But there are several moments on GUTS where her songwriting vocabulary isn’t as expansive as it could be, and despite her fearlessness being genuinely rewarding, it doesn’t always lend itself to the most compelling choices. GUTS is messy, but the gravity of these feelings and the warped confusion that follows almost begs the album to be even messier. The high points arrive consistently when Rodrigo blends humor, courage, and a complete disregard for perfection into her sound — but aside from the stunning portrait of contempt in “vampire,” her ballads feel decidedly less dimensional.
Rodrigo certainly has the capacity for the kinds of nuanced choices that match her vulnerability with active, novel sonics, and GUTS proves that she’s willing and able to embrace the grey areas that these big emotions inhabit. But her fearlessness with a pen in her hand deserves to be matched by the overall presentation of these songs, making it all the more satisfying when she lets these songs bubble up and burst. Her path forward may be inscrutable; the way out, in Rodrigo’s perspective, is to carry on with an immediate outpour of her strongest, knottiest feelings. Though it’s propelled her to deserved success so far, Rodrigo may just be starting to find that the way forward may just be to veer off course entirely. And that, of course, takes a lot of guts.
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On GUTS, Olivia Rodrigo Embraces Her Imperfections and Sharpens Her Sound: Review
Paolo Ragusa
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