Aaron Dessner likes to mention how easy it is for him to work with Taylor Swift’s passed Gracie Abrams. This conflict-free smoothness can be heard in the equally charmingly nice and unattractively indifferent Good Riddance definitely on.
JJ Abrams’ daughter Gracie enjoys singing while Taylor Swift imitates Folklore and Evermore on Midnights stylistically a little bit further. It would be a pity if this constellation and the apparently still unsaturated market in the slipstream of the ubiquitous Phoebe Bridgers were not exploited with the right prominent connections.
Maybe it’s wrong to make it so easy for one’s existence Good Riddance to be deduced (if only because Gracie’s collaborations with Dessner on the debut album, which did not attract much attention This Is What It Feels Like -„billed as a “project” so that she can become more famous before releasing her “debut album““- was noticeably advantageous) – but this interpretation does not feel wrong because of that.
Finally sounds Good Riddance almost without exception like the competently imitated one (no, not Wish-) Free riders to the two Swift albums from 2020, which relies on the exact same sound of gently scurrying rhythms, soft synths, shy piano lines and padded guitar tracks, and probably brands Dessner again as a very limited cooperation partner, if not just one Full Machine how the further variation of that long-declined formula sounds, the vague The National-Tracks in the contourless comfort zone frames of well-tempered contemporary folk decorated with electronic R&B swabs. Of course, there are still far worse things than this localization.
But Abrams doesn’t deliver the substance to fill this risk-free shell – let alone manage to give this template an independent character. After all, the unobtrusive voice with which the 23-year-old breathes dreamy, pleasingly catchy melodies into the ether is fundamentally too harmless and interchangeable, also one-dimensional and simply uniform over the too extensive length of the total playing time without any appreciable amplitudes – although paradoxically, above all the more frontal hooks as in the ones showing a relative spirit of optimism I should hate you, Amelie, Difficult or The Blue in the maintained passivity daring an almost annoying balancing act between boredom and obtrusively presented equality: the fragile intimacy and fragility seems like pastiche.
Where the interchangeable songwriting in edgeless simplicity acts like an aesthetically oriented infusion of exclusively borrowed elements, the content remains as a collection of platitudes without any emotional intensity, banal and clichéd, run-of-the-mill relationship tropes for the background of H&M shopping – admittedly mostly really not unpleasant, also quite authentic, plus the meditative melancholy of the atmosphere with calm restraint and gentleness also really nice serving (which is why rounding up between the points is also justifiable, especially since the 52 minutes of the record are not are bad per se and especially the opener Best also shows potential for the future). But if you make an original or at least creative claim to music, it slips Good Riddance with all benevolence, at least in the redundant, albeit actually failure-free equality.
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