Chappell Roan - Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (2023)

I've admittedly heard all the songs on this album before sorting the tracks in the order they belong. It includes a good number of tracks that are at more than catchy enough to have made it into my semi-regular rotation, and as of time of writing, Chappell Roan's "Good Luck, Babe" is a very promising indicator of things to come.

The album falls safely into the frame of sapphic pop, and as such it has its fair share of sad, emotionally dejected love ballads. They come in different flavours here, each with different facets of young queer love life, and it is mostly love live. They're not all for me, clearly, but I appreciate the technical songwriting in songs like "Coffee", "Picture You", and especially "Kaleidoscope". They keep to this very modern style with minimal accompaniment, but - to me - non-trivial harmonies. It does enough to set them apart, but I think the ratio between the ballads and the upbeat party songs that are definitely more present in discourse. Of course they were the parts of the album that caught my attention too, especially the second track on the album "Red Wine Supernova".

"Femininomenon" and "Hot to Go!" to me fall into the similar boxes. It feels kind of in the vein of "That's Not My Name" by The Ting Tings. Between this and the other break-out hit "Pink Pony Club", there's enough in the album to make it generally a good time, though somehow I feel there's somewhat less substance projected by them than there is in "Casual" and in "Picture You". This might be little more than bias on my part, or perhaps a fault in me not finding much substance in celebration. That's likely why I don't really find myself returning to "Super Graphic [...]" while I do really still like "Red Wine Supernova" and "Hot To Go!" and "Femininomenon" to a lesser extent. The latter is is of course a strong opener for the album, and it showcases something I feel is almost a defining trait of many new artists that have been arriving on the big scene starting around 2020. I feel like many artists now get to showcase their own brand of fun, often while stressing parts that are arguably non-standard. Perhaps the most famous example for this is Sabrina Carpenter, whose own weird sense of humour has facilitated the writing of lyrics that are almost whiplash inducing, but (un)fortunately catchy, because they have yet to let their own quirks overshadow their technical songwriting proficiency. In fact, this songwriting proficiency is something that's somewhat difficult not to take for granted with artists like Chappell Roan and Phoebe Bridgers.

The undercurrent of overt sexuality in Roan's lyrics confers a clear identity to at least this record. It's not really more or less sexy to my eye than most pop albums are these days, but the directness that she uses in her writing is at least refreshing, if not novel, considering many artists had to heavily censor themselves. While we've nominally left those times behind, I think speaking of it with such casualness is still non-standard.

This record has so many great tracks, I regularly forget I like some of them. This is especially true for "My Kink Is Karma", which I catch myself every now and then thinking is a somewhat dreary bitchy piece of almost-electronica, but when I give it a listen, I think I just don't like the hook as much as most of the other ones, and that's not necessarily a fair bar to measure things, seeing as it immediately "Hot to Go!", a song with a hook that I'm sure has existed in some form every since stadium chants have been a thing. "After Midnight" too I regularly forget about, though it is actually a really cool retro/disco beat, even though it seems eerily close to "Attention" by Charlie Puth in some places.

As a first big outing for an artist, the themes in this album are perhaps not the most difficult or unusual, but it feels more intentional than it did for "Past Lives", for example. This might be because Roan's perspective is not the one usually chosen for it. Her music is very much made for people sharing, or at least intimately familiar with, her own perspective, which is much different from the usual approach to writing love songs for a commercial market. I think it goes to show that adding a perspective to an album will make it infinitely more interesting than the attempt to market it by "just" writing good music. I'm personally a bit torn on my own perception of the phenomenon, seeing as I struggle to write even one piece of music, and I'm not sure the idea of releasing every tune that doesn't have a set place in an album as a single alone agrees with me intuitively. Then again, I'm not so involved with, or informed on the music business to make a definitive statement on how to structure an artistic output.

I want to return to "Femininomenon" for a moment. It's a perfect first track for the album in a way. It emotionally covers the themes of the rest of the album and it switches liberally between both general paces that the rest of the album is written in. While it's undeniably very fun, there's is still this undercurrent of unmet expectations that is so often centered in young queer love. Knowing that this album is followed up by "Good Luck, Babe" tells a story, whether intentional or not, of someone learning to navigate these encounters in places where - while nominally accepted - the question of non-heteronormativity still carries significant baggage. I, for one, am looking forward to her future projects, and it's probably not too surprising that the majority of this album has made it into my favourites list.