Hey! Hey! You! You! I Don’t Like Your Record!
Written: Oct 26 '07 (Updated Oct 27 '07)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: There’s no denying the girl can sing
Cons: There’s no point pretending she’s a songwriter
The Bottom Line: The Worst Damn Album of Avril’s career
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| dbcint's Full Review: The Best Damn Thing [PA] by Avril Lavigne |
Take about 20-odd (some more odd than others) people I spent 2003 with doing a polytech course, and ask each of them who my favourite singer is. I can guarantee you’ll get the same answer from each of them: Avril Lavigne.
Fast forward to late 2004, and ask a slightly different group of people the same question. General consensus is still going to be Avril.
Let’s be honest here. At the very least, Avril has intrigued me since I first saw the video for her debut single Complicated. Here was a teenage girl doing pop music, but in contrast to the Britneys and Christinas of the time, she wasn’t using her body to sell the song. She was using her voice! What a novel concept. When the second single Sk8er Boi came out, I became a major Avril fan. Her debut album Let Go was my first Epinions review, and I still stand by my five-star rating.
With her second album, Under My Skin, Avril took on a lot more of the songwriting, and the album suffered for it. At that point, I thought she would soon mature into a much better songwriter because the potential was certainly there.
That was three years ago. Between albums, Avril’s done some growing up in her personal life. She’s now married to Sum 41’s Derek Whibley. As a fan of her music, this to me meant that her next album should be a completely different direction. As a married woman, the angsty teenager image just was not going to work for her.
Earlier this year, Avril released a new song entitled Keep Holding On. This was the kind of material I was expecting to hear on her new album. Fair enough, the songwriting is still a little clunky in places – not everything flows as it should – but overall it’s a nice little song about not giving up, and there’s some definite pearls of wisdom in there. ("Nothing’s meant to change destiny. / Whatever’s meant to be will work out perfectly").
Then she released Girlfriend, and red flags went up all over the place. Stupid. Immature. Juvenile. All could be used to describe the first Avril song to really impact New Zealand charts for four years. Sure, the angsty teenager of such tracks as I’m With You has gone, but instead Avril seems to have reverted in age. Girlfriend smacks of thirteen and fourteen year old schoolkids arguing about who they’re going to go round with. If you don’t believe me, just watch the video, where Avril acts like a complete snobby cow just because she’s not getting her own way. Would baby like her bottle?
However, the schoolgirl attitude goes right out the window as far as Hot is concerned. This is a song about one thing and one thing only – sex. Considering the image she’s been presenting since day one, and especially on Don’t Tell Me, which celebrated abstinence, this is another example of Avril completely betraying her loyal fans. Yes, alright, she’s married now so it’s not like sex is out of the question, and I wouldn’t even say we’re talking about Christina Aguilera Dirrty kind of sex here, but this song seems to send mixed messages to her old fans, and encourages the fans she’s now clearly targeting to get it on regularly.
When You’re Gone is the only single so far I can realistically see making my top 50 come year end. Finally, we get some mature material about missing the one you love. Granted, it’s a topic Mike Shinoda covered two years with the Fort Minor track Where’d You Go?, and he did it so much better than Avril does, but Avril’s song looks like genius compared to the rest of her album, and it’s this track that truly showcases how stunning her voice can be. She shows some real emotion here, and does it with sheer power.
Speaking of singles, one track here really stands out as having major potential, and that’s Contagious. It may be slightly shorter than your average radio single – it clocks in at just over two minutes – but this is easily one of the best tracks on the album. With a catchiness even Mika would be jealous of, Avril quickly and accurately describes the feeling of being obsessed with someone. It’s good stuff.
Once you get past it’s intro, Runaway almost sounds like it should’ve been on her last album Under My Skin. It’s got that definite rock edge – whereas most of this album is more pop – and although the lyricism still isn’t the best, it wasn’t all that great on that album either.
However, on the downside, there’s three songs on this album that make me think of Kanye West. Not that Kanye and Avril are in any way musically similar, but it seems with every album Kanye releases, the reports of his massive ego come in thick and fast. And as far as egos go, The Best Damn Thing, I Can Do Better, and I Don’t Have To Try show Avril has definite delusions of grandeur and a mammoth ego to boot. I Can Do Better is the album’s second track (the opener being Girlfriend), and by the time you put the disc in and get through these two songs, you’re certainly going to be sick of the word "hey". While the backing music here rocks – particularly the drumming – Avril’s voice sounds whiny over the top of it, which isn’t really in fitting with a track where she proclaims she can do better than her current boyfriend. What she can do better than is most of the music found on this album.
I Don’t Have To Try has a slightly more subdued intro, but don’t let that fool you into thinking this is going to be much different to the other egotistical tracks here. Some of the lyrics here are simply outrageous. "Get ready ‘cos I’m on the scene / And I don’t have to try". Maybe if she had put a bit of effort in, the album could have sounded a lot different.
As for title track The Best Damn Thing, if you don’t skip this one after the first ten seconds due to hearing that annoying "hey" word repeated yet again, you’ll hear Avril drag the female species back a hundred years or so by suggesting a guy should always pick up the tab, then proclaim to be "the best damn thing that your eyes have ever seen", and even spell her own name cheerleader style ("Give me an A!" and so on). During all this she dares to wonder where her Cinderella story is. Sorry Avril, but unless you keep that ego in check, you’re not going to have one… but wait a minute, you’re already married!
Despite being just over three minutes long, Everything Back But You starts repeating itself far too early as Avril gives a man his marching orders after discovering he cheated on her, and she does while trying to sound like a one-woman version of blink-182, which just doesn’t work for her. One Of Those Girls is almost Girlfriend Part Two, but slightly less annoying. This time, instead of just telling the man to replace this girl with Avril, she tries to detail everything that’s wrong with said girl, but runs out of stuff to say about her halfway in, and the rest of the track is just lazy repetitiveness.
But perhaps the most confusing part of One Of Those Girls harks back to the Girlfriend line "and hell yeah I'm the motherfucking princess". One of those 20-odd people I referred to in the start of those review was a real "Daddy's little girl, spoilt, blonde airhead" kind of girls, who was constantly referring to herself as a princess. This is exactly the kind of girl One Of Those Girls is about, yet on the very first track of the album, Avril proclaims herself to be exactly that kind of girl!
I became an Avril fan because she didn’t flaunt her body to try and sell her music, and actually made good songs, which is always a bonus. Her debut album Let Go is still one of the best pop records you’ll hear, and I forgave her the bad lyrics on follow-up Under My Skin because when an artist already has a successful album under their belt, it’s only natural for them to want to have a bit more creative input when it comes to the sophomore album. But The Best Damn Thing is a great voice wasted on a lot of truly immature material. Admittedly, she’s still not using her body to sell her music – not as much as some artists anyway – but instead she runs the gauntlet from acting like a spoilt brat (Girlfriend, One Of Those Girls), to showing an ego bigger than anyone else on pop at the moment (The Best Damn Thing, I Can Do Better, I Don’t Have To Try), and alienating her existing fanbase (compare Hot to her 2004 hit Don’t Tell Me and you’ll get a serious case of mixed messages). There’s some good tracks on here (Keep Holding On, When You’re Gone, Contagious), but they’re not enough to save the album. Before recording her next album, she needs to face up to the harsh fact proven by this record: Avril is a singer, not a songwriter. Some people pull off both, she doesn't.
With Let Go, Avril made a great record that got forgotten basically after the third single. Under My Skin wasn't as good of a record, and was pretty much ignored aside from a couple of singles. With The Best Damn Thing, she's finally made the record she's going to be remembered for. I only wish that could have happened with one of the good albums.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
dbcint
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Member: Dean Cowie
Location: Invercargill, New Zealand
Reviews written: 198
Trusted by: 39 members
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