OLIVIA RODRIGO – YOU SEEM PRETTY SAD FOR A GIRL SO IN LOVE: REVIEW
- 5 hours ago
- 3 min read
OLIVIA RODRIGO
you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love (Geffen)
SOMETIMES THE BEST and right answer really is this simple.
Over the weekend I saw an exchange online where someone was asking why is Robert Smith such a fan of Olivia Rodrigo (taking it as read that there’s no need to ask why is she such a fan of him and The Cure) and the response was not a list, not an angry defence, not a spirited explanation, but simply, “because she’s good”. And it was enough.
How good? She’s clever and knows she doesn’t need to prove it all the time, sings well without much in the way of flourishes, stretches the mainstream rather than run to or from it, isn’t afraid of formula but doesn’t need to be strict with it, and can write ballads – in this case begged and the rather special less – that hover between delicate pop and darker-hued country without sweeteners or contrived pain, and another, honeybee, that is dreampop as filtered through an alternative Disney universe.
She’s good enough that even when an album isn’t actually great, it still rates as pretty damn fine and more than enough to be going on with. And yes, the titles are all in lower case. It’s a thing.
You can start with some of the top shelf lines that pepper songs with acuity as much as wit while Rodrigo moves through head-over-heels love and subsequent stumbling questioning to a grudging acceptance of the mistakes that got her there.
That holds whether it’s the pointed “Somehow it’s the weekend, I’m still bored out of my skull/And I went to a party but only on principle”, from maggots for brains (which is not a Funkadelic reference exactly but you can see them from there) and the almost throwaway “I like your big sister, she has your same face/And I tried to win her over with my cynical humour and yacht rock music taste”, that pops up in u+me=<3 (which is not a nod to Ed Sheeran albums, and he’s nowhere to be seen) or the barbed “I’m not kissing any boy that is passive/Their indecision is painfully unattractive” and droll “Yeah I’ve got hope, yeah I’ve got drive, I will not lose my faith/Don’t think my future husband’s at this bar in Silver Lake”, both from expectations.
Or maybe you’ll be swayed by the way the Cure references, musical and lyrical, in songs like drop dead, honeybee and – shock! – the cure (a disarmingly pretty track which actually leans at least as much into Siamese Dream-era Smashing Pumpkins with lyrics more medical than English goths) play less like homage and more like ingrained/second nature, and then her co-written duet with Smith, what’s wrong with me?, feels less Cure and more that exploration of the aching space inside that Terry Hall did well in Colourfield and his solo albums.
you seem pretty sad … doesn’t have the thrusting rock energy that marked her first two albums. This time around maggots for brains is the busiest song and it feels more day dancing in a forest than punching the sky, and the next closest, purple, has a bit of a skitter about it, while synth pop has a greater pull than any new wave of new wave-ness. And that absence of a big push upstairs probably holds it back, keeps it nearer impressively good than properly exciting territory.
But like the way the final song, cigarette smoke, turns from uncertainty to a solidly secure shade of small drama pop, against all expectations – the strings! the rising force of her voice! the fall back into space! – I may need to revisit that verdict in a few weeks or a few months as expectations become less relevant than what is happening in this moment.
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