“I can love whoever I want/Say whatever I want/Do whatever I want,” she declares on “Me Without You,” capturing the sense of relief and possibility that can often line the dark clouds of a painful breakup.
That track, along with most of the rest of the album’s back half, foolishly tries too hard to recapture the attitude and urban-leaning beats in abundance on Stefani’s first two albums. “Red Flag” is a cathartic, eccentric oddity that finds Stefani tempering her anger with irony, her cries morphing into laughter, but the dated “Asking 4 It,” featuring Fetty Wap, and bonus tracks like “Obsessed” are no more worthy of Stefani’s emotional exorcism than 2014’s stale “Start the Fire,” which was wisely left off the album. It’s easy to chastise aging pop stars for chasing trends or trying to recapture past glories, but those efforts here are thrown into sharp relief by the maturity of the album’s first half. Understated pop songs like the buoyant disco-rock “Make Me Like You” and the midtempo “Truth,” which, rather than blast off, chugs along unassumingly, give Stefani the sonic space necessary to mourn the loss of her partner and dream of her future with a new one.
Ughh, I'm so pressed at Rough. It had so much potential to be a great song, but the breakdown/hook/whatever you wanna call it really ruins the song for me. Way too repetitive.
Ughh, I'm so pressed at Rough. It had so much potential to be a great song, but the breakdown/hook/whatever you wanna call it really ruins the song for me. Way too repetitive.
Ughh, I'm so pressed at Rough. It had so much potential to be a great song, but the breakdown/hook/whatever you wanna call it really ruins the song for me. Way too repetitive.
it's only in JP currently. Maybe NZ later.
so happy I found it a day early, since I would not be able to get it tomorrow