When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go Review
Critic'southward Pick
Billie Eilish Redefines Teen-Pop Distinction on a Haunted, Heartfelt Debut Album
- When We All Fall Comatose, Where Do We Go?
- NYT Critic's Option
"I'm the bad guy," Billie Eilish declares in "Bad Guy," the first song on her debut album, "When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do Nosotros Go?"; then the music pauses to splice in one spoken, very teenage syllable: "Duh!" You can hear the eyeroll.
Eilish, 17, has spent the last few years establishing herself as the negation of what a female teen-pop star used to be. She doesn't play innocent, or ingratiating, or flirtatious, or perky, or beautiful. Instead, she'south sullen, depressive, decease-haunted, sly, analytical and confrontational, all without raising her voice.
[Billie Eilish is not your typical 17-yr-old pop star. Go used to her.]
On singles and EPs, like her 2017 EP "Don't Smile at Me," Eilish's songs have treated dear as a power struggle, an absurd game, and a destructive obsession, racking upwardly more than than a billion streams from listeners who patently share her sentiments. On her Instagram folio, which has more than than 15 million followers, she is brusquely anti-fashion, swaddling herself in shapeless, oversized, boldly colored wearing apparel and making silly or ghoulish faces. "I do what I want when I'm wanting to/My soul and then cynical," she notes in "Bad Guy." But that's just her starting bespeak. While Eilish's previous releases take featured her flinty, defensive side, her debut album also admits to sorrows and vulnerabilities.
In some ways the anthology arrives as a continuation, non an introduction. Like her previous releases, information technology'south the work of a very small, incomparably innovative family team. Eilish writes and records her songs with her older brother, Finneas O'Connell, working largely at home. The audio they accept congenital for her is sparse with instrumentation and large with implication. A typical rail uses just a handful of parts, nearly all of them electronic: a bass line, a beat, only enough keyboard notes to sketch a harmony. Eilish sings barely above a whisper, a point of intimacy.
But at whatever moment, the tracks are likely to flaunt their artificiality: adding samples or sound effects, distorting her voice, all of a sudden deploying a large bass driblet. "Wish You Were Gay" — a guy is ignoring her, and she wishes he was indifferent to her gender rather than her in detail — starts with only acoustic-guitar chords and her voice, tokens of pop sincerity. But the mix likewise includes a tittering audience and applause at the stop, insisting that the song is archly theatrical. In Eilish'due south digital-native universe, it's impossible to pretend that anything is unobserved or unmediated; everything is self-witting.
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While albums in the streaming era aren't always fabricated to exist heard every bit a whole, "When Nosotros All Fall Comatose, Where Do We Go?" traces a clear arc: from bravado to melancholy. Early in the album are songs like "Y'all Should See Me in a Crown" — an ominously assured, sustained and then slamming claim to power — and the mocking, music-hall flavored "All the Good Girls Go to Hell," besides as "Xanny," a carol that disdains the trendy overuse of the anti-anxiety drug Xanax. But with a stretch of songs near the cease of the anthology, Eilish turns to thoughts of grief, suicide and loneliness.
"Bury a Friend," with a pulsing, nervous undercurrent and sampled screams, veers betwixt mourning, lashing out and self-destructive thoughts. "Ilomilo" has a briskly plinking, near-ska trounce, but information technology worries over a suicidal friend: "I might break/If you're gonna die not past mistake." In "Listen Before I Go," a glacial piano ballad with looming reverberations, the narrator herself is suicidal; "Distressing, can't save me," she warns, and sirens at the end suggest the worst. It's followed by the whispery "I Love You," a hovering, hesitant confession: "I don't want to, but I dear you."
Eilish began her career establishing what kind of popular star she doesn't intend to be. With her debut album, she's even tougher: tough enough to show some heart.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/arts/music/billie-eilish-when-we-all-fall-asleep-where-do-we-go-review.html
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