Troye Sivan — Bloom ANALYSIS & REVIEW
Published 09/16/2018
As much as I want to possibly sugar-coat this and sound like I’m treating it fairly with regards to potential, purpose, and music of similar tactics, that’s simply not my objective for this blog. I’m here to tell you, hopefully unsurprisingly, that this is pretty terrible. I don’t care what the musician’s motive is, I don’t care how it stands up to other modern pop, and I don’t care how it compares to the musician’s previous expectations. I care how it makes me feel, and with the entire scope of the music world in mind, I say that this doesn’t execute anything of depth, weight, or significance on any level to be worth your time. It’s yet another example of modern pop working the market, generating a formulaic structure, and replacing artistry with calculations on audience retention.
I’m not mad; I’m at a point now where I’m tired of getting agitated over new market-driven music and trying to sound overly-dramatic in my reasons against listening to it. This doesn’t necessarily deserve to be profusely hated on, anyway. This album’s weak final product didn’t have to do with self-absorbance, awful selling points, or a dismantling of any possible success. This work was all-around lackluster simply due to a lack of musical understanding in how to put multiple layers of ideas together. That’s the main downfall, and it’s huge.
These layers were obviously creating individually based on what today’s revenue-generating pop music sounds like, and everyone working on this product was simply clueless as to how to make them sound congenial and interesting, therefore losing any sense of passion or meaning. That’s a failure that simply cannot be recovered from. One cannot just repeat a diatonic three to four chord pattern for three minutes while vocalizing smooth, shapeless lines over it without any correlation, and then attempt to punch home some sort of feeling through cheap, overbearing, undeveloped synthetic noise. That’s what 90% of the album came to be, and what left this as a work devoid of feeling for a listener who thoroughly enjoys the art of music. It’s easy for the record label to copy the same thing that’s always been done and put a new face on it with a different story to tell, but they get no applause from me in doing so.
However, within each layer lies the reason this isn’t complete trash, and the reason not to get the torches and pitchforks out. The melodies were at least singable, range-appropriate, and on the song “Plum” actually the tiniest bit of catchy with a chorus motive using a bit more harmonic tendency and broader shape. For the rest of the work, catchiness was truly evaded, with no repetitive melodic idea doing anything but waffling between two or three inconsequential notes and extending an overly basic and exhausted phrase. Pairing that with the fact that they had no harmonic connection at most times makes this, the most crucial element of the work, a sad failure.
Some of the actual harmonic progressions actually came to sound sustainable for at least a minute, sometimes using slight syncopated rhythms and a pattern of major and minor diatonic chords that combined to create some sense of direction and emotion, like vi and IV or ii and V. Nothing could ever sustain interest for as long as it was actually present though, being the entire god-forsaken track, and the majority of the progressions were not very directive and seemingly chosen out of a hat.
The resulted sound was pretty cringeworthy throughout, though not due to the instrumental foundation having any irritating timbres. As isolated decisions, the basic instrumentation and chosen synthesizer sounds weren’t all that ugly. The irritation came from a) unnecessary synthetic ornaments and backup vocal manipulations disrupting an even-keel dynamic, b) absolute static in every single instrument’s role and what was being played throughout, most unfortunate being when the acoustic guitar or piano had the spotlight, and c) general obviousness and lack of individuality overall, as this very overused synthetic texture could’ve easily been made by a robot who generated it based on listening to hours and hours of modern pop. No life, no character, just trying to sound like you’re one-dimensionally happy or one-dimensionally sad. It sells, but I’m certainly not buying it.
In short, Troye Sivan was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nothing against him; you can’t hate the chicken for having its head cut off. He simply didn’t show any signs that he knew what he was doing, and no one helped him. Sure, there were some individual sparks of nuance and care, but the huge negative in failing to fuse two ideas together or go beyond the basic structural skeleton was a hole that could not be climbed out of. I don’t see a future for him in this art, but oh well. In this business though, that’s a different story; but that doesn’t matter. Despite the best efforts of copying everything around the industry and using a supposed fool-proof formula to ignite basic emotion, I was devoid of any feeling after listening to this. Making worthwhile music is not easy, no matter what your backstory is. This took the easy way out and fell so incredibly flat, just like the rest of them.
