The girl is messed up, the songs are very respectable, as the God of pop commands. She is Gracie Abrams and she has a gift: she turns internal conflicts into cute pieces, but so cute that they become bland. Title of the third album Daughter from Hellmore or less diabolical daughter, but then she puts in a lot of musical moderation. It is a gift, yes, because in the year 37 AD (after Swift) it is one of the things that the public wants: verses, choruses and bridges on afflictions and relationships to be sung first in the bedroom alone and then all together in concert, stuff that obviously doesn't disturb anyone, apart from a few understandably irritated exes.
Abrams is liked by people who like him. The album is produced and almost entirely written together with Aaron Dessner of the National, including his brother Bryce Dessner, but also Justin Vernon, Marcus Mumford (unique feat, on What If It's Right?), Dan Nigro, James McAlister and other talents. And you can hear, just as Abrams' abilities as an author and singer are evident, her way of synthesizing moods into effective images, the appreciable variety of singing registers, so much so that the whisper pop label is now too narrow for her. Daughter from Hell it's the story of how the singer-songwriter got here and the crises she faced, as well as one of those records that tell you how to guard your pain, something only a twenty-year-old can do (Abrams will turn 27 in September). Apparently it's a phase you have to go through and going through it together with 12 thousand others in a sports hall isn't bad.
Daughter from Hell it's also a record full of relationships in which essentially everyone is a little wrong and therefore you have to decide where your own and other people's responsibilities end. But sometimes there's no doubt who the bastard is. In Death Wish he turns the knife in the wound, the sadist, and does it smiling. In the song that follows and is entitled The Knife she decides not to take out the blade, but to carry it around stuck in her side as if nothing had happened, “I'll probably keep it for the rest of my days, I'll probably give it a name, then I'll take care of it and claim it”. It is perhaps the image that best summarizes the tone and purpose of the album. Without that knife there wouldn't be many of these songs and in the end pop today is also this thing: singing the same old story to people who have never heard it and doing it with the confidential tone of a friend making a confession to you even if Abrams has an air of a pop aristocrat that should discourage any illusion of a parasocial relationship.
There's pathos ready to explode into pieces like Death Wish And Hit the Wallabout a relationship that ended badly and perhaps also about the obsessive-compulsive disorder that Abrams said he suffered from. “I would like to be constant, but every now and then I give in, I use it when I can, then I reduce the dosage”, he sings in this confession of discomfort and confusion which contains a quote from A Case of You by Joni Mitchell and a pretty good bridge about coming “face to face with every girl I've ever tried to play.” There is a beautiful, brilliant vocal arrangement in the song that gives the album its title, there is the farewell story sung with a certain gracefulness in Broke My Heartwhich is one of two pieces written with Vernon. The other is Hummingwhich says “wake me up from this horrible nightmare where what seems true is nothing and there's no one up there to believe: what a way to feel, at twenty.” I told you this is theBe twenty years old of one who says she “thought about difficult things under the influence of soft drugs, like every night.” Even rich people get high.
Abrams sings about the years she has put behind her and therefore about identity, mistakes that are repeated, pills, dark evenings, emotional disconnection, relationship conflicts, social anxiety, obsessions, the weed she smoked at 17 and for which, she obviously jokes, she is now paying the price, in the sense that she thinks she isn't there in her head so much. However, a distance remains between the disturbances evoked by the lyrics and the cuteness of the music, even if from the point of view of compositional solidity, production, taste for sonic details Daughter from Hell is probably the singer-songwriter's best album. It does not contain memorable songs, not even one, and those that are there to be appreciated must be taken in their right measure, in their details, aware of the lyrics and the way in which Abrams sings certain phrases or Dessner lays out an arrangement as in a Folklore with more cities and less province. Of course, by the tenth piece about the end of a love story you want to listen to a song about having a night out. Which arrives, it's the eleventh, it's called Minibar and is written with Audrey Hobert. “I think I'm high and everyone knows it,” Abrams sings, undecided whether to throw herself into an evening with 50 dollars in her pocket and a single neuron in her head or escape from those people who make her feel weird. The listener is left with the desire for a bit of irony, of lightness. There is some, but not enough.
Emerging in the wave of post-Covid American singer-songwriters clearly influenced by Taylor Swift, Gracie Abrams contributed with her three-minute post-adolescent melodramas to the process of feminization of pop and the return of the centrality of the word in the song. For some, however, she is the sad girl who has no reason to be, being the privileged daughter of director and screenwriter JJ Abrams and producer Katie McGrath. The title track is dedicated to her and in which the singer describes herself as “a pill to swallow”, apologizes to her, essentially explains that she would like to become like her now that she is no longer a teenager and rebellious. As if that wasn't enough, speaking of fortunes, her boyfriend is the actor Paul Mescal, co-author here of Imaginary Friend and she herself will make her film debut in Please by Halina Reijn. Does all this make the songs of an author who here and there says she feels like an outsider less credible or does it make them more interesting? “Oh well, look at my life, I bet you wouldn't think so, but it's a pretty tough time,” he sings at one point. “My nightmare has come true, I got what I wanted, but something is wrong.”
Speaking of luck, Abrams went to the Popcasts of New York Times and she said that she understands those who consider her a nepo baby and that, hallelujah, it's true that she is privileged, that not having to worry about financial support is a big pain in the ass, as is having parents introduced to the world of entertainment. Good. His problem isn't mum and dad, it's the implacably mild and predictable tone of some compositions and the length of the album, 56 minutes which seem like 76. With the result that Daughter from Hell it doesn't evoke the hell suggested by the title or even heaven, it's rather a sweet purgatory with four, five songs too many. Messed up girls are interesting, but those who manage to put that torment into music too and not just into lyrics are even more so.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
