In occasions such as the sophomore studio record from Freya Ridings, Blood Orange, this was exchanged for the art of assembling an automaton, where parts from other contemporary acts are assembled like a clone assembling their host’s personality: spare ideas without soul, and more egregiously, with what sounds like a woefully misappropriated budget.
Attempting to decipher the chorus of “Bite Me” while being attacked by searing shots of white noise from overly compressed high hats is a task better left for one of the two producers it crept by in post. Combined with thin, bluesy vocal layers on title track “Blood Orange” and a concept of auditory depth left purposefully vague, the virtue of having nationalised budgeting seems lost on a record content with living in a post-Adele landscape.
Tracks like “Wither on the Vine” and “Wolves” are so assuredly going through the motions of reconstructing an Adele song that one would expect her to accidentally break out into “Rolling in the Deep” at the beginning of each track out of habit. This unfortunately emanates from the rest of the tracklist, broadened out instead to a modern volume of Now That’s What I Call Music where every vocal is replaced by Ridings. The staccato pianos on “Happier Alone” and propulsive upbeat strums on “Bite Me” are instrumental parts that seem lifted from the great, empty void of ‘sounds a bit like-’ ad nauseam; what throws out the case for originality over contempt of court is Dua Lipa’s “Love Again” seemingly placed in this record’s tracklist as a song entitled “Weekends.” Funny how that got there.
To eschew the oft-made mistake of believing a record is not quality simply because it borrows from the great contemporary songbook, I would add that if these are made to ape other artists, they have forgotten the modus operandi that makes those tracks work: go for broke. If your goal is to sell, let the people hear your money, unblemished and focus-grouped to the point one might enjoy it out of spite alone. As it stands, however, the only benefit of an undertaking like this record is that of an American New Deal program: employing enough writers to drop the unemployment rate.
