Not long after recording Camp Cope’s 2018 barn-burning second album How to Socialise and Make Friends, lead singer Georgia McDonald decided to stop screaming. Her rousing delivery elevated the Melbourne band’s songs to fevered peaks; on tracks like “The Opener,” McDonald bemoaned the misogynist music industry with irony and venom dripping from her voice. Before recording her solo debut, the singer took voice lessons to soften her singing and sound more like she’d always wanted to sound. “Instead of just yelling, I’m trying to actually make something that sounds beautiful to me,” she said in a recent interview. “There’s no angry screaming about anything anymore.”
Pleaser, the first record McDonald has released on her own as Georgia Maq, strays far from Camp Cope. She places her voice in an almost entirely synthesized milieu, a dramatic shift facilitated by producers Katie Dey and Darcy Baylis. The album’s subject matter suits its new dressings: Instead of singing about politics or family, or the complex and sometimes destructive bonds between friends, McDonald focuses on romantic love and self-love, romance’s quiet counterpart. She aims for pop bliss, but her melodies, which tend to be simple and reiterative, don’t let her lift off.
Most of the production fine-tunes ’80s pop techniques to 21st-century ends. The pearly leads and bright, expressive snare on “Driving Blind” sound siphoned from Body Talk-era Robyn, while “You’ll Be Singing My Name,” one of the record’s livelier cuts, adopts a bouncy piano backdrop that echoes the instrumentation on Lorde’s “Green Light.” With its binaural synth strobe and melancholy vocal lines, “Like a Shadow” could be mistaken at first listen for one of the moodier tracks off Caroline Polachek’s recent solo debut. McDonald has no regrets about leaving her punk roots in the dust, but her voice can sound slack against its newly airless environment. She’s ironed out the particulars of the singular and commanding voice she cultivated with Camp Cope and hasn’t tailored herself a new set of idiosyncrasies, leaving a blankness at the center of her singing.
Many of the best pop songs begin with a familiar backdrop and then electrify it with a surprising twist, eliciting joy from the shock of the unexpected. Robyn’s chorus melodies begin simply and then surge away from their starting points; Lorde’s Melodrama lives and dies on its often jarring chord progressions; and Carly Rae Jepsen sings herself into a breathless frenzy by the end of every track. McDonald’s first foray into synth-pop sets its sights on similar highs, but rarely takes the risks needed to achieve them. Compositionally, there’s more setup than payoff; choruses tend to consist of just a few notes, with little development and even less surprise.
Camp Cope’s albums established McDonald as a powerful frontperson and lyricist, and while her presence does often feel blunted on Pleaser, her knack for clever lines still surfaces. “At least I built the hill on which I’ll die,” she sings on “Away From Love.” On the scuttling closer “Big Embarrassing Heart,” she overturns a romantic cliche: “I will run to you with open arms and only hold myself.” She belts the line with enough conviction to make it sound like a happy ending, a testament to self-sufficiency. In moments like these, where McDonald loosens her reservations and surrenders to the full impact of her voice, the spark she’s always nurtured shines through.
