(2020) beabadoobee - Fake It Flowers


Review:
With each piece of music she releases, Beabadoobee’s Bea Kristi takes huge steps forward — which is saying something considering that the first song she ever wrote, 2017’s “Coffee,” quickly became a viral hit. Though that single’s whispery simplicity won her an audience, it didn’t capture the sound in her head. On the Loveworm and Space Cadet EPs, she enlisted a full band and producer Pete Robertson and looked back to the ’90s, an era whose moods and sounds she digs deeper into on her debut album, Fake It Flowers. It’s easy to understand why Beabadoobee finds that era so inspiring, even though it was over before she was born. Those years were a heyday for outspoken young women, whether they were musicians like Veruca Salt and Juliana Hatfield or fictional characters like My So-Called Life’s Angela Chase (one of Fake It Flowers‘ finest moments, the swirling yet barbed “Dye It Red,” sounds like it could be about her). Like many members of Generation Z, Beabadoobee doesn’t just blur the boundaries between indie and mainstream, she erases them entirely. Back in the day, Fake It Flowers‘ glossy production might have seemed too slick, but it blends together everything in Kristi’s songs — gliding shoegaze, jangly indie, grungy catharsis, and ambitious string arrangements — into something fresh. Beabadoobee interprets these sounds more holistically here than she did on her EPs, which playfully dropped names and influences in ways that wouldn’t have worked as well on a full-length. Though “Together” and “Yoshimi, Forest Magdalene” deliver more of Space Cadet‘s irresistible, candy-coated grunge-pop, Beabadoobee covers much more musical ground on Fake It Flowers. Her singing is more expressive than ever on the gossamer verses and sneering choruses of “Care,” the bright, brash declaration of independence that kick-starts the album. There’s a newfound fury to the thundering “Charlie Brown” and “Sorry,” a seemingly fragile ballad that invites comparisons to the Sundays and the Cranberries, then explodes them with an eruption of guitars. She makes room for the intimacy of the “Coffee” days on sketches like “How Was Your Day” but also on “Horen Sarrison,” a love song where sweet lyrics (“You remind me of the pavement after the rain”) drift into more unsettling ones (“I want you to feel uncomfortable”). This gift for distilling complex emotions into relatable songs is just as vital to Beabadoobee’s music as her rapidly evolving sound, and both shine on Fake It Flowers.


Tracklist:
01 - Care
02 - Worth It
03 - Dye It Red
04 - Back to Mars
05 - Charlie Brown
06 - Emo Song
07 - Sorry
08 - Further Away
09 - Horen Sarrison
10 - How Was Your Day
11 - Together
12 - Yoshimi, Forest, Magdalene


Media Report:
Genre: indie-pop, indie-rock
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits