With Good Riddance, Gracie Abrams partly shows who she is, but mostly who she loves. The influence of other singers is a little too marked in her work, but, behind the branches, the singer-songwriter lets glimpse the extent of her potential. Gracie Abrams will be performing at the MTELUS in Montreal on March 10.
Talking about Gracie Abrams only by comparing her with Taylor Swift, Phoebe Bridgers or Lorde would be reductive. But it is also impossible not to draw parallels between the work of the young singer-songwriter and that of her predecessors.
Just listen to the opening track of Good Riddance, Abrams’ first album, released at the end of February, to find a flavor that we know well. On Best, the cadence, the voice, the production, the words: everything evokes Taylor Swift. On the next, I Know It Won’t Work, all of these same elements are akin to Lorde’s work. The piece I Should Hate You screams the name of Phoebe Bridgers. Throughout the disc, we can lend ourselves to the same exercise.
There, it is said. The young artist, daughter of director JJ Abrams, is at a stage where her inspirations rub off a little too much on her own essays. But Gracie Abrams is also much more than a Taylor Swift model. The room FullMachine, for example, proves it to us. Unique and catchy, the song also demonstrates the elegance of the artist’s pen, one of his strengths.
“Just brush me off/Cause I’m your ghost/Right now your house is haunted,” she sings on I Know It Won’t Work. With this first album, Abrams reveals himself, questions himself, apologizes… Some songs show more vulnerability than others, but who said that you always have to be deeply intimate to make a good song?
The melodic contrast between its verses and its chorus is brilliant on I Should Hate You. We feel here, and everywhere on the album, the touch of Aaron Dessner, who knows how to put his genius to the benefit of the style of others. The founding member of The National, who counts Taylor Swift and Bon Iver among his close collaborators, co-signs all the tracks on the disc and produced them all as well. If this album sounds so good, it’s largely thanks to him.
Gracie Abrams’ voice is a whisper. A melodic and just murmur, of course, but which does not yet allow us to quite determine how far she could push the note. This is something that time will surely reveal to us. Gracie Abrams has the aura of a rising star. We should continue to hear about her for a long time.
Pop
Good Riddance
Gracie Abrams
Interscope