Beabadoobee

This morning, Beabadoobee put out her fourth studio album, ‘Pylon’. The British Filipina artist has built this album around a heavier sound, with both the singles for the record, Switchblades and Sun Has Set, being slightly punkier than a lot of Bea’s previous work. This was compounded by the short and sweet feature list of Brandon Yates, Turnstile’s front man and Hayley Williams, two of the biggest names in punk music. This sadly isn’t the case. The album is about as Beabadoobea an album as it gets. It is an indie pop record about a breakup, going over the seven stages of a breakup. The album is 14 songs and 40 minutes long, which by modern standards is a lot of shorter songs, with only 2 songs making it past three and a half minutes.

Highlights of the listen are definitely Sun Has Set. I know it may be familiarity bias, since it was a single, but I still think it is the best song on the album. This is the only song on the list that has made it onto my playlist, and I think it is a great song that the rest of the album fails to match. The LP definitely has other good songs on it; don’t get me wrong. ‘It’s Alright’ and ‘Radio’ are both good songs; I gave them a 7.5 out of 10, and from speaking to some friends, I am confident Radio will become a fan favourite going forward. The final song I want to highlight is the closer, Satellite. This song is great. It is the only other track that feels like it meets my expectations of what the album was going to be. It feels different and daring; that’s what I wanted. The vocals in the chorus especially impressed me, with the heavier, shoutier tones providing an extra dimension to the story of this release.

The story of the album was that of many others, a breakup story. ‘Write Me A Letter’, ‘In Motion’ and ‘Nothing to Prove’ feel like pretty clear songs capturing the motions of bargaining, sadness and acceptance, respectively. With these songs having such clear messages that have been told a million and one ways in music, it’s difficult to make the songs feel anything other than filler. This is a shame, particularly on ‘Nothing to Prove’, which I felt was one of the weaker tracks on the recording, mainly as there is so much talent between Beabadoobee and Hayley Williams and the song didn’t do anything to show that off. The low point of the album for me falls in the 3 songs before ‘Satellite’, consisting of ‘Powerlines’, ‘Spark’ and ‘Despite That’. Powerlines has the Brandon Yates feature, and is a good song, but it just feels half-baked to me, and that is so annoying. What is there is a great start and feels like it could be a great song, and then it just kind of ends, and for that disappointment, it left me feeling very, oh, is that it? Spark is the closest thing on the record to a bad song; all the others are a mix of okay to very good. Spark is bad. The song doesn’t accomplish really anything; the idea of wasting opportunities to be lifted out of your depression is great, but when the song just goes in circles for 3 minutes and ends. That is not great. The lyricism is uncharacteristically boring from Bea, with a large serving of na na na’s supplementing vague messaging around playing with sparks and sharp toys. Sometimes it felt like the song was touching on self-harm and suicide, but that was never expanded on. Other times those same lyrics felt more applied to wasting opportunities. It just feels a bit messy. Finally, there is Despite That, which feels too short to be a real song, but it’s trying too hard to be a song to be classed as an intermission.

Overall, considering this is Beabadoobee’s fourth studio album and how good the last two were, Pylon feels distinctly average. Being average by Beabadoobee’s standards makes it a disappointment. A great artist who has great work in ‘Beatopia’ and ‘This is How Tomorrow Moves’, but Pylon for me doesn’t hit the heights it could have.