a) Boring acoustic/rock ballad type stuff (Joanna, for a recent example)
b) You straight up just lose your fucking mind.
Guess which one Katy went with this album?
Man, was this a torture to go through. I was genuinely excited for an interesting disaster of a project, but I didn't get anything close to that. Nothing here was very interesting really, and all that is thanks to the production on this album. It's really separated in 3 parts. First you have Max Martin, a seasoned producer that gives me a sigh of relief when I see his name on a pop songs credits. But I'm sorry, aside from the singles, every track he produced on this album all ran together. With the first 3 tracks being "Witness", "Hey Hey Hey", and "Roulette", I was genuinely waiting for the first song to come to an end, only for me to realize I'm 1/5th through the album already. He really dropped the ball here, and HARD. Secondly, you have these randos named Purity Ring, who handled quite a few tracks on here. They were the guys that produced "Rise", and no fucking surprise, they also produced all the boring tracks on this album. The frustrating "Mind Maze", with it's nonsense beat and ambiance, as well as "Bigger Than Me" and "Miss You More", both of which bored me to tears. These dudes were certainly not the move that Katy should have made. With combination of these tracks and Martin's tracks, it really feels like Katy took half a dozen steps back, or at least her staff did. But thirdly is the tracks from a bunch of random producers you'd never expect. On one hand you have DJ Mustard, who's presence is so unnoticeable I actually can't remember what fucking song he took part in. But then you get Jack Garratt of all people producing "Power", which is easily the best song on this album with it's powerful drums and the chilling atmosphere it has. Unfortunately, this song and the singles are the only stand out tracks, which counts up to 4/15 songs I can pick out of a crowd, which is ABYSMAL. And the singles don't stand out for good reasons either. Chained To The Rhythm is still as soulless as ever, Bon Appetit is still just as disgusting as it is messy, and Swish Swish has an admittedly serviceable piano intro, but is counter balanced by a bleak synth and horrendous sample that clogs up way too much of the song. These 3 songs sound absolutely NOTHING like the rest of the album. Hmmm...it's almost like Katy made these songs purposely sound weird and have shocking subject matter (which we'll get to soon) to get people interested in her boring album. Oh, but she'd NEVER do something like that! That's just absurd!
The rest of the songs are just the same old same old from Katy. Some boring drums, boring synths, and your occasional cheeky piano line. All of this, barring the pretty exceptional track "Pendulum", could've been tossed on Prism as album filler and no one would have batted an eye. This album lacks so much creativity. She made a shitty "stay woke" anthem in Chained To The Rhythm, the creepiest food fetish song since Candyland by fucking Justina Valentine in the form of Bon Appetit, and she made a fucking diss track to Taylor Swift, and that's it. Gassed out at 3 songs, the rest is Max Martin auto pilot.
But if there was any place this album was lacking, it was in lyrics and content. I already talked about the shock value/click bait horseshit of the first 3 singles, but the rest? Nothing special. You got generic love songs, and just boys in general with no style or substance to pull you in. Then you got the REALLY dumb shit, like "Save as Draft", where Katy uses social media slang/lingo to "relate to the youth" like she's your out of touch mom. In fact, Katy Perry has basically turned into the "cool mom" from Mean Girls, and is equally as mentally unstable.
But ignoring the concept, the writing on Witness is horrendous on a technical level. A lot of these lines are fucking horrendous, 2013 Big Sean levels of "I can't fucking believe they just wrote that".
"A hot little hurricane, ha!
'Cause I'm feminine and soft, but I'm still a boss, yeah
Red lipstick but still so raw, yeah
Marilyn Monroe in a monster truck"
Is any of this really empowering? "Yeah, a famous female figure in a motorized vehicle that's mostly considered male. Who runs the world? GIRLS!"
"LOL at all your limits"
No words for that one.
There's WAY too many lyrics about "staying woke" and everything, including a track dedicated to her emotions when Hilary Clinton lost the election. But every time she tries to go for this, her ideas fall flat on their fucking faces.
"I ain't got no strings (no strings)
I'm no one's little puppet"
It truly is embarrassing to listen to. Equivalent to an 11 year old who just watched porn for the first time trying to teach all his friends what sex is.
"I've shattered the illusion seen behind the curtain"
Girl, you haven't shattered SHIT. You made the most misguided album of all time and you still think you're some sort of goddess.
"Yeah, they slither like a centipede"
CENTIPEDE LITERALLY MEANS "100 legs" ARE YOU FUCKING STUPID? HOLY SHIT KATY GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER!
But nowhere is the writing worse than it is on "Into You See Me", the closing track. It's a song based around Katy talking about how her lover has broken all the walls she has set up.
"Then you came and started digging for a treasure underneath
And you found a better version of me I had never seen"
Fight Song had more grit than this shit. But that's not the worst line. THIS is the worst fucking line.
"You broke me wide open, open sesame"
I don't understand how they let a line like this so stupid, so asinine, so flat out incorrect through. It's not sensual, it doesn't show any vulnerability, it's just fucking stupid.
Fuck this album, this is a WRECK of a project. The potential was huge and it all crashed down on her. Production was either steps back or steps sideways to VERY mixed results, the features are mostly meaningless and forgettable, and her vocals sounds like she couldn't give less of a shit about how much of a lyrical minefield this bullshit is. Avoid this at all fucking cost. If there was any textbook example of doing a pop album wrong, this would be the first one to come to mind. Katy, if this was the world you envisioned, you can fucking keep it.
OVERALL: Strong 2/10
BEST: Power
WORST: Into You See Me, Bon Appetit ft Migos, Save As Draft, Chained To The Rhythm ft Skip Marley
jk
ReplyDeleteYOU'RE TOO NICE TO THIS ABORTION
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