CAMILA - Camila Cabello (ALBUM REVIEW)

                                   

"Are you ready to learn how to delay an album release?"

Dr. Dre gulped

Tinashe nodded

Hannah Diamond shuddered

Jay Electronica blinked nervously

"Yes Camila Cabello" they said in unison


Ok, now I got the jokes out of my system. Anyways, today is the day, isn't it? Finally time for MY cynical biased hatred mindset to review the self titled album of the new big thing: Camila Cabello. Now, I have MANY of words to say about this girl, her marketing, and everything about her I could possibly twist into a negative light at the drop of a hat, but I'm not going to. I am going to completely ignore (or at least mostly TRY to ignore) the behind the scenes of this release and how everything up to it from the royally mismanaged promotion, numerous delays and countless axing of songs (including singles and what was supposed to be the lead single) influence me to believe this is going to be a full out disaster. My goal here is to be as unbiased and fair as possible. Because at the end of the day, the mass public listening and buying this album, all they want is some good pop music, which is really all it's about and what this album should be critiqued by. In that positive light, I actually really do enjoy Havana, one of the most positive I've ever been on a review here, so maybe I should have some faith in this spunky unfortunately hot young pop starlet. She made a great pop song, which means she can do it again, although with Young Thug's verse on Havana being the only feature on the entire album, that means she'll have to do it on her own. So, how did she do? Did Camila beat her former girl group? Did she drop a classic filled with 10 Havana's? Or did she fall into mediocrity, or possibly even form an album that showcases her biggest flaws and everything I despise in pop music?


*sigh* Y'know what? Fuck it. Let's start this over.

I'm going to be biased as FUCK in this review. But guess what, it's MY review. Yes the music is what matters most, but a person's character does impact the music, as it's THEIR music that they're singing. So, if you want to hear a typical review jerking off to her "eclectic style" and "Giving Ariana a run for her multi-octave money" while slapping a 4/5 with the most robotic, cookie cutter review possible just to snatch a pay check, go ahead. Hope it makes you feel validated about your fave. Here, you're getting the opinion from me, someone who is completely biased against this girl, but more importantly: a pop stan. I fucking LOVE pop music with all my heart, I have poured so much of my time into pop music, and to see it devolve to where artists like THIS are borderline A-listers disgusts me. Now, let's start over again, with this incredibly biased review.

So yes, I fucking hate this chick, I absolutely despise her, and it's for much more than just her exit from Fifth Harmony (and before you say "nothing was wrong with how she left", yeah, running off doing collabs without telling the rest of the group, leaving HALFWAY THROUGH the 7/27 tour, and despite going to counselling with the girls and trying to find enjoyment in the group again (which I respect), her leaving WITHOUT TELLING THE GIRLS FIRST is TOTALLY not some snake ass shit). I'm mad about her being Syco's new special baby, who gets solid promotion, massive collabs, and a fucking behemoth of a budget, while Fifth Harmony got like 5 months to make an album with so much control it might has well been self produced. Camila got to delay her album for as long as she wanted (I assume it was originally supposed to be released in the summer considering CITC was in May) and got to craft her perfect lovechild of an album. Also, "we didn't think Havana was going to be a hit". Oh yeah, really took a risk with a Pharrel/Frank Dukes beat with Starrah backing vocals and a Young Thug verse, talk about breaking boundaries). But fuck it, whatever, who cares about all the behind the scenes shit (well, I do A LOT, but I can easily ignore it) if the music is good? So that's what I'm looking for. I don't need think pieces, don't need apologies (I actually DON'T want those), don't need this grandiose project. I just want a good ass pop album. Give me some great melodies, hit a couple of cool notes, have your sassy songs and your sadgirl songs, and write a sex song that's not embarrassing. I REALLY don't think I'm asking for much. So, did she deliver?


Well...no, not at all. The album sucks, but it isn't the *normal* type of suck I like to review. This album isn't like a Reputation, or a Memories...Do Not Open, aggressively bad albums with a laundry list of flaws that infuriate me. Camila was just insanely mediocre, uninspired, and overall felt 37 minutes too long. But not only that, I feel like I've been mislead by her. Many reviews of this album stated how Camila showed her Latin roots in this album, and I was stoked for that. Obviously Latin doesn't inherently mean upbeat, but I thought at least SOME songs I'd be able to dance to! But other than Havana (which we've already heard, and I already like), She Loves Control (which loses nearly all of it's Latin flavour from being produced by fucking SKRILLEX), and one throwaway line on one of the deepcuts how she lives in South Miami, we really don't really get any of that. More importantly, we don't get much out of Camila in general. All the songs are about another person (mostly in the vein of love songs) and never about herself. If I was a random teenager in my car who just heard Havana once and decided to check out the album it's on, I would learn virtually nothing about Camila Cabello. Say what you will about her, she has a personality. She isn't like a Rita Ora, who is just this stonefaced black hole of an artist. Camila is clumsy, ditsy and childish, but with a lot of energy and a sort of innocent charm to her. In this album, not a glimpse of that is shown. This could've been a Rita Ora album and no one would've noticed. Speaking of which, the vocals!

Now I know I've basically built my blog around ragging on Camila's vocals at this point. As someone who listens to Reflection and 7/27 songs bi-hourly and has probably heard more Camila than most, I can say without a doubt her vocal abilities are absolutely horrible. Her voice is thin and constantly fizzles out at the end of words because she can't hold even a basic note without having a heart attack, and she has 0 grit or weight in her voice. I cannot stand her and she grates on my nerves, she just sounds pathetic. That being said, that doesn't mean she isn't workable. Her voice always comes off as pathetic sure, but that can fit the bill if the song you're going for has a pathetic/sad or even childish attitude. Hannah Diamond's voice is extremely childish, which is why songs like Every Night work absolute wonders. If Tinashe performed Every Night, it would be creepy as hell, and if Tove Lo performed Every Night, I'd probably call the police. Point is, Camila's limits as a vocalist shoves her into the lane of sad songs and cutesy songs. "Like Mariah" off Reflection for example, on an objective level, she sounds fucking terrible, I don't think she's on key for a single second she is on the track. And yet, it's easily my favourite vocals she's ever done. The whole song sounds so innocent and stupid, I mean she's saying "so sweet like honeycomb" for fucks sake, it's super cute (yes I am well aware the song is about orgasms). On this album, she's hit or miss, but mostly miss. I like how she sounds on "Consequences", definitely the 2nd best track behind "Havana." A nice little piano ballad where she doesn't go too crazy and gives a decent, consistent performance, I like it. But then you have the BAD moments, where she squeals and shrieks constantly. "Never Be The Same" has her abusing the concept of falsettos and sounds breathtaking in the sort of way of Stone Cold Steve Austin having a tight iron grip on my lungs and crushing them slowly with his cold coarse hands. I was just recently sick Camila, I don't need you to give me another fucking headache. Then you have "In The Dark", which she does have childish vocals when says the line

"You're runnin’, runnin', runnin', runnin’
Making the rounds with all your fake friends"

Which matches with the lyrics, so I give her points for that. Unfortunately, those points are IMMEDIATELY taken away for the abysmal bridge, easily the worst section of the album, where she just loses her mind and tries to go wild and play with her vocals that she just doesn't have. How are there artists like Zara Larsson with beautiful voices who are too scared to take risks and then fucking idiots like Camila Cabello just wilding out, squealing her way over a shitty piano line? (Side not, I'm pretty sure this lyric is totally stolen from another song? But THAT'S something we'll get to later).


There aren't many good melodies here for her to ride on either (of course outside of Havana) which means she's working off of raw strength and charisma here, which she does not have. I can throw all my shade at Camila all I want, but she has a spark to her voice. It's a spark that sends a sharp pain to my urethra, but she stands out, can easily pick her out of a crowd. On this? Again, she sounds like Rita Ora, or Hailee Steinfeld, just any female artist that slots into "White Girl On Hook" syndrome. Her quirkiness is nowhere to be found, even for the people who like her voice I can't imagine liking this, as she displays none of what she's known for on here.

Production wise, it's a huge disappointment. The big chunk of this project is produced by Frank Dukes, who I like. He's hit or miss like most pop producers yes,  but he's been hitting recently, co producing some great songs for Amine, Lorde, and Frank Ocean. But here? Well, it's clear that the producer that made Havana's beat so nice was Pharrel, because strip him away and this album has nothing. Consequences sounds kinda pretty, decent piano ballad, it works. The rest? Throw it in the fucking bicycle bin, dear lord. "Real Friends" has the scratchiest, most awkward guitar I've heard in recent memory (the person who mixed that needs to be castrated), the fucking molasses sour grape medication of  "Something's Gotta Give", the empty brain transplant of "Never Be The Same", which sounds as pleasant as nicotine, heroin and morphine getting injected into your colon, or the unbearably cheap and cheesy "Inside Out", which sounds like it's going to teach me the fucking alphabet rather than Camila wanting a boy to bone her. I'd struggle to call this a "misstep" considering I don't think there was a step at all, none of these producers seemed to care, ESPECIALLY Inside Out. Seriously, fuck that track.

But this leads us into the main problem of this album, and what I thought WOULDN'T be a problem: the lyrics. Now I had 0 idea how talented Camila was as a songwriter, but I presume she'd be able to come up with something to entertain me with considering how much she went through over the past year. And if not that, there were a talented list of artists said to be helping on this project. Ed Sheeran, Charli XCX, Tyler The Creator, a BUNCH of very talented people that can definitely write a solid song. When I was looking through the credits of this album, I found nearly none of these people were listed anywhere. The only notable name I found was Ryan Tedder, and I wouldn't classify that one as a good thing (especially when he was put on the SEX SONG). So while yes there's writers out the ass listed all throughout this project, Camila might as well have been on her own, and MAN does it show. There is not a single original idea or lyric here, not a SINGLE fucking one, besides of course "Havana". The one thing that I will give her credit (well, it's more "not drag her" for) is not putting a 5H diss song on here? 5H made a song called DNA which was most likely a shot towards Camila, and it was HORRIBLE. They didn't put it on the album of course, they probably had enough hindsight to know that was an awful idea, but they still made one. Camila didn't, I acknowledge that, and appreciate that, good job. But the things she DID write, dear fucking lord, let's just go down the list and break it down. "Consequences" is a song about how loving someone is sometimes really hard, with face palm worthy formulaic sections such as

"Loving you was young, and wild, and free
Loving you was cool, and hot, and sweet
Loving you was sunshine, safe and sound"

and

"Loving you was dumb, dark and cheap
Loving you will still takes shots at me
Loving you was sunshine, but then it poured"

Which The Sun called "a tear jerking unlikely cross between Mariah Carey and Joni Mitchell"

yeah ok lmao

"In The Dark" which had it's moment with the "fake friends" line loses all of it's potential when she says

"Who are you in the dark?
show me the scary parts"

Which sounds like a lyric John Mayer wrote a decade ago and very quickly flushed down his toilet.

Her next single "Never Be The Same" is one of the most uninteresting, most basic songs you'll hear on pop radio this year, with a "your love is my drug" metaphor so unoriginal and 1-layered that the pre-chorus literally has her listing drugs off (and Camila, honey, "morphine/nicotine" does not even remotely rhyme with "heroin"). Filler lines that vaguely resemble love, dropped rhymes galore, and overall a very boring listen, probably the worst on the album. Or, well, it WOULD be if "Inside Out" didn't exist, which along with it's cheap elementary school piano and what sounds like a fucking marimba, has the least sexy, most laughable lyrics of a pop song since Kay Perry's "Into You See Me". "I wanna love you inside out/Show me what yo inside 'bout" she coos as I struggle to figure out how the fuck she passed the 5th grade. Absolutely laughable lines such as "Thought you could go on without me/Now you can't see you without me" made me burst out laughing for the entire song with her playing the cheesiest love/sex song since Marvin fucking Gaye completely straight. Is she insane?

I obviously don't like this album. But what knocks it down so much for me is it's purpose. "Reputation" gave you a look inside the Taylor Swift/Kanye drama, Taylor's shitty response, and a look into the psychotic, fucked up mind of "The New Taylor", and "Memories Do Not Open" at least had features left and right for you to scratch your heads at and think how the 2 would click, as well as got you to think if the entire album was one huge fucking joke or not (I for one still think it's 100% serious and The Chainsmokers are legitimately idiots, but that's another story for a review I already did). Sure, CAMILA is bad, but very few of the tracks really piss me off. What makes this album so trash for me is this: I have no idea why ANYONE would choose to listen to this. If you wanted a sex song, Tove Lo could make you feel hotter than anything Camila and Ryan Tedder of all people scrape together on "Into It". If you wanted an UPBEAT song about sex, Rihanna and countless other pop stars have been doing it for decades with more personality and tact than "Inside Out". "Never be The Same" uses the classic Your Love Is My Drug metaphor so stupidly when nearly any pop star who has more than 2 albums has a song just like it that's twice as good, including the track literally labeled "Your Love Is My Drug" by Kesha. If you wanted a generic female vocal performance that you can dance to, I'd like to direct you to the EDM scene that's been shoving countless unrecognizable female vocalists down our throat for the past 3 years, who actually have respectable or at least interesting producers behind them than a 2018 checked out Skrillex on "She Loves Control". "All These Years" sounds like a cross between Love Yourself by Justin Bieber and Starving by Hailee Steinfeld, which even if I don't like them have more going on in them to warrant them listens over Camila's bore in the store, and the remaining sad girl songs do not have any of the flair, emotional weight, or sharp writing than the deepcuts on Melodrama by Lorde. This album offers NO originality and purpose outside of "Havana", which would be fine if the tracks were good, but they just AREN'T. Tove Lo basically recycled her same fucking album with "BLUE LIPS" last year, but at least she gave passionate vocal performances, interesting production, a narrative, some sort of story to tell! It's basically the same story she tells every album, but it's a great, touching story that makes you think about Tove Lo's character. What does this album tell me about ANYTHING. It tells me nothing. It's fucking worthless. Which again, isn't a necessity. I don't love "7/27" by Fifth Harmony because it's a revolutionary album with ideas never dared to be done before. I love it because it's a damn good pop album. This is not.

This is usually the part where I say "fuck this album", but you know what? She doesn't even deserve that. I'd tell her to improve, but she doesn't need to. As of writing this her album is No.1 in like 82 countries or some shit, breaking records and all that, she's winning. Obviously a LOT of people like her, I'm just not one of them. I'm not mad at Camila, I'm just very depressed a genre I love and care for as much as pop music is being tarnished by someone as WORTHLESS as her. The huge, worldwide success of this album doesn't make me lose faith in pop music. It only makes me wonder why I even fucking bothered to have faith to begin with.

SCORE: 3/10

BEST: Havana ft Young Thug

WORST: Inside Out, Never Be The Same

TRACK RATINGS (/10)
Havana ft Young Thug - 9
Consequences - 6
She Loves Control - 4
All These Years - 4
Into It - 3
Something's Gotta Give - 3
In The Dark - 2
Real Friends - 2
Never Be The Same - 0
Inside Out - 0

(Not rating the Never Be The Same radio edit, I was negative as it is)