Boldness is the hallmark of Demi Lovato’s new album, “Dancing With the Devil … The Art of Starting Over”, a statement that will not surprise anyone after the pop star’s media blitzkrieg in recent weeks. The fact that it is not a surprise is an advantage or a problem, depending on your point of view.
Is the release of the album the culmination of a cycle in which she told her unnerving story in a series of documentaries and interviews for him, or is it in danger of coming out as an afterthought in this campaign? She has been such a dominant figure in the pop news that it’s hard to believe that only two and a half weeks have passed since the YouTube serialized movie “Dancing With the Devil” debuted on South By Southwest. Hearing the same harrowing and now legendary events of your addiction and recovery going on in music sounds a little like: Did you see the hit movie; now here’s the musical adaptation of Broadway.
“The Art of Starting Over” (we will now refer to the album in the second half of its forked title, to avoid confusion with the film) fits perfectly into a confessional pop tradition that extends at least from the future of John Lennon -re-edited “Plastic Ono Band” for most of Taylor Swift’s work. Probably any other record in this historical tradition delivered its frankness and shocks right on the day of the release, not following a full-length teaser, which makes this vast collection of 18 songs (22 in the digital edition with increased bonuses!) Harder to evaluate on its own. And it’s not just the documentary: the trial may be even more cloudy with the release of a video clip for the half-title song, “Dancing With the Devil”, which is likely to arouse strong pro and con opinions by putting Lovato in near-deadly makeup, recreating the worst moments of her life singing while she sings on a hospital stretcher, tubes stuck in her nose instead of a headset.
If “Start over” he did reach us in isolation, without accompanying projects or exaggerations to manipulate expectations, here, in the best possible way to theorize this situation, is what we would probably end up saying about it: It is, in fact, bold and brazen, and sometimes distressing (to use all adjectives already applied to the film), and Lovato dares from Malibu to the Atlantic and returns for exposing himself in such cruel terms. It is almost noteworthy, really, in that confessional pop-rock lineage we were discussing, for how few filters she cares about putting in a private life made public. And … we would like the songs to be a little better.
We should probably add that the ratings are complicated by “The Art of Starting Over” not knowing exactly what kind of album he wants to be. It is an open diary and turned into a sheet music with blood on the pages, yes … except in the moments when you just want to become a pop album. This betting constraint is basically a good thing: you don’t want a 22-song album focused only on one person’s suffering. But that It’s a little difficult to keep track of where “Starting Over” is going when, with just three tracks, Lovato’s spoken interlude arrives and literally says the album is starting again, and there are several other major gear changes to come (though none of them announces itself so grandly).
It seems that Lovato conceived these first three pre-interlude tracks as his own EP-within-LP … the stimulating soundtrack to the hyper-reality of “Dancing With the Devil”, the documentary, receiving the shock-and- Admiration got out of the way right away before giving the listener and herself a license to relax a little. Of these three, and indeed of the entire album, the opening “Anyone” is the best track. Presented exactly as she sang at the Grammy in January 2020, accompanied only by a piano, it appears underwritten, but underwritten in the best and crudest way, putting personal desolation on the line with a rawness even Lennon can be proud of … although she A therapy version of the primordial scream vocalizing will always lean towards Broadway with a harsh sound in the throat. “I feel stupid when I sing” is still one of the most stimulating things an artist has ever sung, at least this popular artist, in front of so many millions of people, at that level of thunderous natural decibels.
This is loud enough – or low enough, if you prefer – that it’s not a terrible thing to say that the rest of the album can never get over it. But take a quick dip with “Dancing With the Devil”, although this recount of a relapse starts with a very promising opening verse: “It’s just a little red wine, I’ll be fine / It’s not like I want to do it all the nights / I’ve been good, haven’t I? / I think I deserved it… ”The addicts’ justification gives way to the cliché images of hell and the bland dramatic production, while a memorable pro forma chorus leaves the music’s potential to become something really fascinating for purgatory. This is followed by another solo piano ballad, “ICU (Madison’s Lullabye)”, this is a sweet counterpoint to “Anyone”, with Lovato sharing his sadness about letting his younger sister down when she ended up in , yes, ICU – something that probably should never be turned into a “see you” pun, even with the noblest of intentions.
After that strange interlude now-the-album-is-really-starting, it will be a relief that Lovato has a light R&B rhythm for the first time with From others the title song, “The Art of Starting Over”, although its pleasant insubstantiality is somewhat violent after the Götterdämmerung of these first three tracks. “Lonely People” has a chorus almost sung over a base guitar riff helping to make the track look like a decent Avril Lavigne / Selena Gomez hybrid. One of the highlights of the album, the acoustic “The Way You Don’t Look at Me” – one of the few times you heard a steel guitar on a Demi Lovato track – does an incisive job of saying how the silent apathy of a lover can be worse than going to “hell and back”; not for the last time on the album, Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter make a good team of writers for her when it comes to dealing with “problems”.
“Melon Cake” tries to divide the difference between the two sides of the album: it is in that superconfessional way, like those first tracks – Lovato talked about how, in part of his forced diets as a child star, his coaches put candles on watermelons instead of real birthday cakes – but with a touch of foamy pop instead of musical melodrama. A promising song in theory, but hearing Lovato sing “No more melon cake” repeatedly belies the album’s willingness to settle for too many elementary and singing chorus lines.
Your collaboration with Ariana Grande, “Met Him Last Night”, is not the battle of divas you expected; it’s too much of a “devil” song on an album that lacks sulfur-free images, and there’s a reason the track co-written by Grande hasn’t made any of his own recent albums – it’s a bonus track, at best . This is one of the few tracks that Lovato had no part in writing; another, and much higher, is “Carefully”. Without the autobiographical details that the singer is trying to incorporate in every corner of the collection, “Carefully” stands out for being more impersonal … but it is also a work so beautifully melodic and well done that it makes you wish she would return to the studio to a non-conceptual album of such good external contributions.
“The Kind of Lover I Am” reaches another current point of discussion for Lovato – the pansexual. It seems that a truly provocative couplet, “I don’t care if you have a stick / I don’t care if you have a WAP”, was put on an existing song. But producer Oak knows exactly how to sell the easy, light chorus that’s the best on the album, with smooth, layered background vocals and a live sound band that takes the album out of all that hellfire and puts it on some place on a sexy tropical island.
“Easy”, a duet with Noah Cyrus, breaks that sunny mood with a return to the melodrama – loaded with unnecessary strings that sound directly from ProTools, although the credits say they are real. The boring mode continues, but at least it increases the pace with “15 minutes”, a farewell to a lover who supposedly clung to her for Warholesque’s fleeting fame. In addition to the opening number, the album can peak lyrically when Lovato, who doesn’t like immense measures of personal modesty, declares: “I’m not innocent / I know I’m a headache, but I’m working on it / That must be an honor / I even had time to worry. ”The honor of contemplating this type of lyrical audacity is all ours.
The biggest disappointment goes to the collaboration with Saweetie “My Girlfriends Are My Boyfriend,” just because one of the best lyrical concepts on the album, and even a very good line-by-line performance, is wasted on the most aggressively annoying track on the set. Whatever title may seem promising, it is no longer a nod to pansexuality – it is a friendship hymn about romance or, as Saweetie inevitably puts it, “girls on sticks”, but the crisp lines on the verses are cut by a nursery – rhyme that even a child can get tired, let alone adult women who need a new hymn for girls’ night.
“California Sober” lends the album a beautiful breath of Cali-folky-pop Santa Ana from a musical interlude … just alluding to and making no literal lyrical reference to the herb and alcohol that fit Lovato’s controversial definition of “ avoidance of hard things ”(Elton John will not include this song on his personal playlist, anyway.)” Mad World “, his version of the frequently covered song from Tears for Fears, clearly belongs on the album because … they set a goal of 21 tracks for the album and got stuck at 20? It’s not bad, but it’s a mystery. The non-luxurious part of the album ends in a satisfying location with “Good Place”, a reasonably happy conclusion to ever that once again proves that Tranter and Michaels are good partners. Put the seductive and sophisticated feel of the acoustically rendered melody into the repetition, and you can even convince yourself that the album is not as dispersed as it is.
“Good Place” really does a great job of showing Lovato’s superior voice in non-belter mode, making it a good support for the opening that was “Anyone”, just over an hour before. What comes before “Good Place” often seems to be everywhere – a planned tour de force that should probably have defined whether it really wanted to be a soundtrack to “Devil’s” work or just completely revert to Fun Demi as a tonic for all the trauma shown in the documentary. Among the openly autobiographical numbers, there are very good and not so good numbers; the same gap happens the more escapists the album gives. This might not be a problem if “Art of Starting Over” had an undeniable success in helping to bridge the gap. But there is no doubt that she is alive, well, singing more than just good and getting around small problems like making an album that looks coherent instead of dancing with Mr. D.