Album Review: Lovesweet by girlsweetvoiced
The Ottawa singer prices out a whole romance in mirror pics, green juice, and money she’d burn through twice. Her songs about losing the man outdo her songs about keeping him.
Adriana Mallya began filming and recording her records as girlsweetvoiced with the producer Michael Uzowuru, writing the way people talk about their exes to a best friend, in green juice and phone numbers and Energizer batteries. Every purchase, promise, forgiveness, and oath of celibacy on Lovesweet is for one man who will never respond to her. He collects bathroom mirror pictures, pet names, most of her money, and entire seasons of waiting, and his payment is the crush he won’t admit and attention span he can’t maintain. Every gesture in her songs has a price tag attached.
The ledger begins to roll in the bathroom of “Mirror Pics,” where she’s taking couples pictures with a man she’d give anything for and catches herself in the swoon: “You got me writing love songs/And I never write love songs.” Even there she knows better and reminds herself she should hold back on giving up everything for him. She prices it out on “Energizer,” where devotion doubles as the running tab: “I’d run out of all my money/It’s a pricy habit, hoping that you’ll love me.” She’ll stick around forever for him, if he wants her; according to her account, she’s crazy enough. She ends the song with a spoken aside, “I thought it was gonna be Christmas,” the holiday she saved up for but never came to be. Dumbest version of the deal is “Dumb & In Love,” just days from visiting him again, tired of imagining, praying to heavens and finding out that she can fly, sure that if it fails she’ll be counting the afterglow as a blessing anyway.
She knows how the bad ending goes even before he gives her one, and on “Downfall of Little Me” she takes the fall for herself and guesses what he truly thinks of her, deciding that it will remain a mystery forever, blaming herself for her mistrust, hesitation, and difficulty communicating. “It’s not your fault/I’ve dropped the ball,” she apologizes to him, making a case against herself for setting up the wall. On “Kinda Like,” she strips down the formula even further and is happy with a love she kinda likes. In the chorus she asks for nothing else: “There’s no need for a working mind.” Being blind until the night is easier for her than one more hour of thinking about him.
Breaking up with him becomes a whole routine on “You Don’t Want Me,” green juice, a spiritual detox, an ayahuasca trip from which she walked out the same woman. The costume is meant to impress just one person: “Don’t I look real good like I’m someone who’s over you?” Her clothes become plain, she has free time on her hands, she assumes he has money, and she doesn’t think about anything but what he did to her. She still sleeps in his shirts and calls him her baby. She thinks of one sensible idea, a new number: “Lose some digits, add some hours of slumber,” but immediately talks herself out of it and comes up with every single reason why she shouldn’t be with another.
He doesn’t break up with her on “Spearmint,” swears top left that he has no crush on her, but his hands can’t stay off her. And she names their deal correctly: “It’s a twisted addiction/Remarkable non-fiction.” They waved around all the red flags from the beginning, she recalls, and she remained “Bruised up and still so smitten,” liking small diseases. On “So Long” she plays the same trick on herself, sends him home in the verses, don’t look back, you know where you belong, but the parenthetical underneath keeps saying the opposite: “I want you to come back, I want you to,” whispering at the one already gone.
Beside the man in “Spearmint,” the one in “Ruby & Stone” could be anybody, as simple as the sun, as faithful as the moon, a hot spring with love flowing off him, weather where “Spearmint” had a person with hands and breath. She promises to follow him everywhere, and everywhere stays blank. On “Cranberry,” she breaks into pieces, literally, her word, and holds them together while praying the sadness away, her life supposedly never better. She comes up with only one line worth saving, “Wishing the silence wasn’t radio,” and sits in silence with whatever is in her hand.
Her answer to all of this silence is “Tonight,” the one carrying a sample of Joni Mitchell’s “California,” cleared after Mallya reached out to Mitchell herself. There’s a place she goes to run and hide, and tonight she promises to take him along with her there. She was too shy for daylight and opens up only at night, where he makes her talk faster, relax, go beyond herself and everything else that she never could. “I’m not so damn shy in the middle of the night,” she sings, and jumps in head first to prove it.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “You Don’t Want Me,” “Spearmint,” “Tonight”