Album review: brat by Charli XCX

 

Just like Hit Me Hard and Soft, I bought brat on CD based just on the album's reputation. I hadn't listened to even a single song, but I did know about brat's massive popularity and figured that it was an album I probably should listen to. And besides, I just had a really good experience with Hit Me Hard and Soft, which is probably my #1 album of the year. So, I picked up brat shortly after, and now, over a month later, it's finally time to write down my thoughts on this album.

There are some albums that I love from the first listen, and there are others that I only love after having listened to it constantly for weeks. brat is the latter type for me. I am a massive fan of this album and I love it, but I definitely did not love it on first listen. I had just listened to Hit Me Hard and Soft, which is a completely different kind of album, and brat is not an album that benefits from a comparison with Hit Me Hard and Soft. Over time, however, I learned to look at brat on its own terms, and that is when I started to love it.

Something I believe about music is that if something is popular, there's probably a reason why, and if I don't like something that's popular, it's probably because I'm looking at it from the wrong perspective. All music has something valuable about it, and if you think that pop music sucks, chances are it's an issue with your perception of the music and not the music itself. So, in order to get the most out of brat, I had to figure out what standards to judge it by. I needed to figure out what the album was trying to be, and form my opinions in light of that.

So, what is brat? On the surface, it's nothing but club music. It's heavy four-on-the-floor beats, abrasive and repetitive synths, and the lyrics aren't all that deep- at least, that's the surface level reading of the album. If you're looking for fun music that isn't that deep and isn't particularly innovative or unorthodox, you'll find plenty of that on this album. And if you only listen to brat once or twice, that may be all you hear. Over time, though, you'll start to see that there's more below the surface.

I've noticed a phenomenon with music that I don't like on the first listen- those songs that make me vaguely uncomfortable the first few times I hear them often end up being some of my favorites later on. That happened with "360", "Girl, so confusing", and "Everything is Romantic" off of this album. At first, I was put off by those songs not making much sense to me, and I didn't really like the surface level readings of those songs. But over time, as I started to sink my teeth into those songs, I started to understand what was going on and I started to like them after all- and that basically sums up my experience of the whole album. The surface level reading is boring, offputting, and sometimes irritating.But once I got past that, I started to love the album.

For a more specific example, I'd like to bring up "Girl, so confusing". I really didn't like that song at first. I was hearing it as a pretty vapid account of what womanhood feels like. I wrote it off as just another "being a woman sucks" song, which isn't particularly interesting and isn't a message I really want to hear because despite the challenges, I actually really love being a woman. I couldn't imagine myself any other way, so I'm going to mentally resist any time I hear information that contradicts that. However, as I listened to brat more, I started to pick up on what "Girl, so confusing" was actually trying to say. It's about the contradictions in womanhood, the uncertainty around how others see you, and the difficulty of understanding your place in a world that is simultaneously obsessed with you and indifferent to you. Those are all feelings I know well and can deeply relate to. And if I had only listened to the song once or twice, I would have missed it.

One big feature of the album that I did understand from the first listen was the importance of the sound design. brat is pretty much all synths and drum machines, with the occasional acoustic instrument- most notably the incredible piano part in "Mean Girls", which is one of my favorite moments on the album. But overall, the dominant soundscape is synths that could have come out of the 90s, and that's not a bad thing. Charli XCX's vocals are, as usual, pretty heavily autotuned to the point of being an aesthetic choice. For the record, I love that aesthetic, but it's also worth mentioning that the moments on brat where the autotune drops out are also some of the best moments on the album. I initially criticized Charli XCX for not being vulnerable enough on brat, but as with most of my initial criticism of this album, it didn't hold up after multiple listens.

On my first listen of brat, I told a friend that I wouldn't rate it more than a six out of ten. I said the first half was uninspiring, and the album would only be good as background music because I probably wouldn't want to actively listen to it. All of those things were wrong. Today, I would put brat in my top five best albums of the year and I've been listening to it constantly since I bought the CD. I prefer the first half over the second half, but I love the whole thing. And I put it on when I want to listen to good music, not just as background music I don't care about. In fact, I've probably listened to brat more than I've listened to Hit Me Hard and Soft recently, and that's my album of the year. I find brat to be fun and accessible, and also plenty deep enough to listen to as "serious" active listening. I'm gonna give brat a 10/10 as an apology for my harsh words at first, and my favorite song off the album is "B2b".