This is the same girl who made “Senorita” and “Havana”?!? What happened with this album? Camila has jumped the shark in terms of making her art. This album is just bad on so many levels. From the production, the song ideas, her vocal performances, and the guest performances. Everything on this album just feels like a bad idea, and no one told her that it was. Im guessing she wanted to experiment with her sound, but it feels like she is trying really hard to rebrand herself to seem hip and sexy, and it just feels embarrassing. I will say that some of the song beats have an okay feel to them, but unfortunately the other song beats are pretty underwhelming. The songs range from incoherent and cohesive songs like “I LUV IT," repetitive lackluster beats like "DREAM-GIRLS,” to disjointed passable beats like on “Pretty When I Cry." However, those can be overlooked when the biggest offender on this album is Camila herself. Her vocal performances are confusing, overproduced, and just sound awful. The heavy use of autotune just kills any sense of good vocal performances. “I LUV IT,Chanel No.5”, “, "Twentysomething “B.O.A.T.” and “Hot Uptown” all suffer the same fate of her using these atrocious effects. Now the vocals aren’t just bad but the lyrics as well. The lyrics feel like they were half written with placeholders, and they never went back to revise them. Like on "b.o.a.t." she has a weak hook using best of all time instead of greatest of all time, so it feels like she's trying hard to be different and cleaver but its falling flat. All the ideas on this album just feel half baked, and so try harder to be cool; it just feels lame. The features she got on this album either work well with what they are giving, like Little Nasx on “HE KNOWS." He sounds better on the track than her with her because she is doing some werid whispery-like vocals that get overshadowed by the beat. Or the guest performances kind of stay their welcome, like Drake on “Uuugly.”. Like the teack before that, he sounds good for a while, but then you give him a while of songs to sing on and he sounds terrible. It's just poor idea after poor idea on this album. Like on "305tilidie, it's a soft piano interlude about girls getting ready to party, and it’s supposed to be thoughtful but just feels boring and bland. The only time it does sound good is when she strips herself of the autotune and sings more naturally, and you get better performances from her, like on “pink xoxo." Maybe she was trying to reinvent herself and get away from the image she created earlier. Its hard to see what kind of vision she was going for with this release, but it just feels like a huge misstep and big step backwards for her, and largely a lot of forgettable material on this record.
RATING: 4/10
NOTABLE TRACKS:
Pink XOXO
He Knows
Hot Uptown
Pretty When I Cry