Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic
The third time’s the third charm for Olivia Rodrigo, who is beginning to look like she might be constitutionally incapable of not turning in one of the year’s most diverting albums, in any given try. Not many artists have started off with as smashing a three-peat as Rodrigo and her producer/co-writer partner Dan Nigro, who’ve pulled it off again with “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love.” But just what the “again” entails here involves some wrinkles, since the departures taken go far beyond just dispensing with one-word titles. After two terrific but roughly similar albums, “Sour” and “Guts,” their inevitable task was to stray a bit from signature sounds and firmly establish they intend to not be a one-trick pony. Even if the initial trick was pretty great.
The big initial revelation upon a first listen to “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love” is that Rodrigo and Nigro have done a clever trade. The pop-punk style of the most ferocious parts of the first two albums is gone, as promised… but the rock isn’t. At least not if you consider “The Roq of the ’80s [or ’90s]” — to quote the old slogans for L.A.’s KROQ-FM — to be rock. About half the album involves a revival of those classic new wave sounds, something that was at least hinted at when the lead single, “Drop Dead,” employed a mid-song synth line that threatened, briefly but delightfully, to turn it into a Flock of Seagulls tune. Friends, there is more where that came from, and if you long for that slightly pre-grunge period where giant synth riffs and drum machines ruled rock, there are roughly a half-dozen songs that will put a goofy grin on your face. Listening to the album’s penultimate track, “Expectations,” I thought, “Missing Persons? Found!” It’s slightly goofy, and wholly wonderful.
Of course, it’s not just the cheesier side of new wave that these collaborators have a thing for. The album tracks the arc of a love affair: Rodrigo’s love affair with the Cure. The pre-release tracks made that much clear. First, there was “Drop Dead,” in which Rodrigo made a big call-out with the words, “You know all the words to ‘Just Like Heaven’ / And I know why he wrote them / Now that you’re standing right here.” Then came the second single, which had nothing to do with the Cure except for the fact that it was called “The Cure.” Next up in the batter’s box, Rodrigo revealed, via a surprise duet at Primavera, that the new album’s “What’s Wrong With Me” actually features lead vocals from Robert Smith. You might have thought that was all there would be to it, but that’s before you finally put on the album and find that it has the one missing piece, a song that actually sounds like the Cure, “Maggots for Brains.” She’s gone beyond a Cure trifecta on the album to a sort of Cure superfecta.
Now, if the entire album were marked by this late ’80s/early ’90s revivalism, you might wonder if Rodrigo really did have a cranial worm infection. No, just an earworm infection — and as much good fun as the new wave throwback stuff is, it’s more of a recurring flavor than something that turns “You Seem Pretty Sad…” into some kind of revivalistic concept record. The less uptempo tracks sport a continuation of her penchant for acoustic balladry. (Welcome back, “Lacy” — in winsome spirit.) And among the 13 tracks there’s also a fair smattering of what can only be termed contemporary pop, without any nostalgic elements, apart from how she and Nigro make a superior use of choral vocal stacking that does recall some of the great harmony-based folk-pop recordings of yore. It’s the most musically all-over-the-map of her three studio albums, and to its benefit; this is exactly the right time in a career to make sure everyone understands they didn’t fill their full palette right out of the gate.
But it’s the emotional tenor that will linger, long after you’ve finished debating online whether a particular electric guitar sound feels like more of a nod to New Order or the Strokes. There is a secondary love affair being essayed here beyond the one with Robert Smith, and Rodrigo did a fairly effective job in pre-release commentary of explaining how, thematically, this would be a two-part album. (The demarcation is literally where the LP side break takes place, though you’ll get the idea quickly enough as a digital lassie or lad.) The first seven songs track Rodrigo’s giddy infatuation with a new love, while the remaining six numbers on the flip follow her as she realizes she never was as happy as she thought she was, as ennui leads to a nearly anticlimactic-sounding breakup. She’s said she intended to go through with the experiment of an entirely upbeat record, but circumstances changed, and the diaristic nature of modern pop singing-songwriting demanded some gutsiness about how things went sour. By the final stretch of the album, it will become clear that she seems moderately heartbroken for a girl in romantic purgatory.
The mood that this mostly chronological album eventually settles into will seem more comforting to some fans, in some ways, than the happy-go-lucky stretch that it begins with. Of course we’ll like her when she’s mad! Except anger isn’t the dominant emotion here, at all — although there are familiar flashes of it, especially in the moving and regretful closer, “Cigarette Smoke.” Whatever romance Rodrigo is tracing the history of apparently did not end in cheating or any other horrible behavior that would lead her back toward the kind of recriminatory rockers that were among the previous albums’ highlights. There are not a lot of gory or even careful details about what went wrong; mostly it’s just a sense that her partner became passive while she stayed passionate, or tried to. Coming to the glum realization that love isn’t outlasting infatuation is trickier to write about than a more incendiary subject like unfaithfulness, but Rodrigo pulls it off.
More than once in the lyrics, Rodrigo mentions having a stomach ache as she grapples with whether this love she’s extolled isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. Talk about pretty in pink: for its second half, anyway, this is an album to drink Pepto-Bismol by. The world has already heard “The Cure,” in which Rodrigo seems to claim an intrinsic toxicity in her very blood that even a partner’s best efforts can’t override. It’s a centerpiece track to start off Side 2, and the finest song on the album, taking the better part of five minutes to build from a rapid-strummed acoustic riff in the fashion of Smashing Pumpkins or Foo Fighters to a snare-drum-and-strings crescendo that tips you right to the edge of your seat. “I got toxins in my bloodstream / You tried hard to suck them out / And it feels like medication / And it’s good for me I’m sure,” she sings. “But it don’t matter how your love feels anymore It’ll never be the cure.” It’s a classic “It’s not you, it’s me” anthem of self-abnegation and doubt — and with a rush to the finish that strong, you’re thinking, how is this not the climax of the album?
Well, because there is more storytelling to go before the real breakup occurs, and before she gets to the final “It’s not me, it’s you” portion of the record. With the simple ballad “Begged,” recently previewed on “SNL,” Rodrigo allows that her lover is saying and doing all the right things, but it’s not as meaningful as it should be because she had to coerce it out of him. The nagging feeling grows in the Smith duet, “What’s Wrong With Me,” which has very old-school synths and the most basic of drum-machine beats as backdrop to the two trading verses about how “My head is spinning and my stomach is sick / Say I’m in love, so it’s hard to admit / I can’t eat, I can’t sleep / I think you’re what’s wrong with me.” The melody is sprightly enough that you could almost mistake it for a catchy love song, rather than a reluctant My boyfriend is the actual virus song.
But there’s no mistaking this unpleasant sensation turning into actual heartbreak in “Less,” a piano-accompanied torch song that is about the torch going out. It’s the closest thing she has done to a traditional chanteuse song, and she explores that unexpected mode beautifully, bringing real pain to a clever lyrical twist, as her partner “does the noble thing” and, after a failed attempt to stir the embers by recreating their first date, becomes the one to cut the chord. “If loving me means letting go and wishing me the best,” she sings, “then I guess I wish I wish I wish you loved me less.” And suddenly a sequence of songs that has been dealing with romantic ennui gets a knife-turn-in-the-gut twist that no amount of antacids will make feel better.
If this sounds like a dour way to be wrapping up the album — and it kind of is — well, there’s always that giddy-as-a-lovestruck-schoolgirl first half to go back to. Anyone who is young and in love and wants to savor that feeling can just turn it off after track 7, and if you’re more naturally inclined toward cynicism, you can enjoy those ebullient crush songs knowing that the heroine ie eventually headed for an unhappy ending, the same way the most heartless person can enjoy Maria feeling pretty in “West Side Story.” Rodrigo really is unabashed in her embrace of (seeming) true love in the early numbers where blinders are fully on, like “Stupid Song,” which insists in the chorus, “I love you more than any stupid song can ever say,” something that she really puts the lie to in the effervescent and perfectly articulate verses.
Writing about happiness is harder than coming up with a good sad song, nearly any writer will tell you, and so it’s indeed a pleasure to have Rodrigo turn out to be a perfectly expert crafter of silly love songs, while it lasts. In “Drop Dead,” she writes of a first date, “All pressed up in the bathroom line / You’re looking like an angel on the walls of Versailles,” and whether or not you’re prone to accompanying your significant other through opposite-gender potty queues, you know exactly why this strikes Rodrigo in the throes of attachment as a rapturous image. She’ll admit having gone through the motions of saying this stuff before, but in “u + me =
