Avril Lavigne - Avril Lavigne

I’ve always had a relative soft spot for Avril Lavigne, not because her career is built from consistently solid albums (in fact, Lavigne’s discography is infamously spotty, marked by great pop singles and not much else), but because I always felt like she was unique in the landscape of pop music. It’s not just that she worked with Butch Walker on pretty much all of her best songs—though that certainly didn’t hurt—but rather that her sassy punk image and her loud, distinct personality always showed through in her songs. Lavigne was at her best on her second full-length—2004’s Under My Skin—where a dark pop style (on the Walker-penned “My Happy Ending”) and a rebellious tone (the other big single, “Don’t Tell Me,” which radiated a genuine girl power message that not many pop stars have been able to replicate since)—set her apart from the other pop music on the radio at the time. Other than Pink (who, big surprise, also utilized Walker as her go-to co-writer and producer), no other female pop starlet of the early 2000s gave off the same in-control confidence. Here was a pop singer/songwriter who was going to make the music that she wanted to and do it her own way, damn anyone—especially the label—who tried to tell her otherwise.

Unsurprisingly, Lavigne lost a lot of her appeal when she sacrificed the sass and attitude in favor of sounding just like everybody else. On 2006’s The Best Damn Thing, Lavigne enlisted the help of superstar producers and songwriters like Dr. Luke, Kara DioGuardi, and Rob Cavallo to make a slicker, more streamlined pop record. The radio world was reeling from Kelly Clarkson’s Breakaway, a monumental mid-decade success story that had brought both Luke and DioGuardi—as well as another radio titan by the name of Max Martin—to the forefront of pop songwriting. My distaste for Luke is well documented at this point, so I won’t go down that rabbit hole here, but suffice so say that The Best Damn Thing’s two biggest singles (“Girlfriend,” the peppy eighties aping lead-off track, and “Keep Holding On,” the flavorless power ballad closer) did nothing to bring out Lavigne’s strong personality. The next album, 2011’s Goodbye Lullaby was even worse, relying mostly on Lavigne’s own writing post-heartbreak, a move that would normally bring out the best and barest work in an artist’s career, but one that left Lavigne feeling more bland, boring, and faceless than ever before.

Tellingly, Lavigne’s fifth album is a self-titled effort, meant to indicate the start of a new era for the pop songstress, and indeed, right from the beginning, Lavigne is back in her sassy comfort zone. On the chorus of the lead-off track—a jaunty single titled “Rock N Roll”—she proclaims, “Just put up a middle finger to the sky/Let ‘em know that we’re still rock n roll,” and on the next song, she’s “running down the street, yelling ‘kiss my ass.’” In other words, Lavigne is right back to being the immature, vitriolic sk8er girl she was 10 years ago, and Avril Lavigne benefits remarkably from the transaction.

That’s not to say this album is spotless. Lavigne has mostly ditched the bland balladry of Goodbye Lullaby at this point (though the closing ballads, “Falling Fast” and “Hush Hush” are similar bores), while Dr. Luke, Max Martin, Kara DioGuardi, and the rest of their generic pop songwriting compatriots are nowhere to be found. Instead, we have to deal with the overbearing influence of Chad Kroeger, Lavigne’s new husband. (He’s also known in some circles as “that fucking douchebag from Nickelback.”) Kroeger gets co-writing credits on eight of this record’s 13 songs, and while his presence is often drowned out by the rest of the songwriters on board (of which there are many), his poison can’t be drained entirely. On “Let Me Go,” Lavigne and Kroeger duet over a maudlin, comically overproduced arrangement of strings and acoustic guitars. From the moment Kroeger lets forth his first constipated vocal groan, “Let Me Go” is the absolute nadir of Lavigne’s discography.

Luckily, Kroeger’s vocals are quarantined to that one track, and Avril Lavigne spends the rest of its runtime working hard to make up for the mistake (though the album’s other duet, with nineties shock rock monstrosity Marilyn Manson on “Bad Girl,” is nearly as painful to sit through). As happens with many pop albums like this one, the best songs are up front. Butch Walker unfortunately stays far away—it’s the first Lavigne album he hasn’t been involved with since 2004—but Boys Like Girls’ Martin Johnson steps in to fill his shoes, and Johnson’s style—while far from original—is a perfect match with Lavigne’s rebellious attitude. For instance, the Johnson co-penned “Here’s to Never Growing Up” is a rousing anthem of a track that could appeal well to the same audience that turned fun.’s “We Are Young” or Taylor Swift’s “22” into chart standards. The chorus namedrops Radiohead (for some reason) and the verses pay tribute to drinking, staying up all night, basking in the warmth of bad decisions, and making a lot of noise in the process. It's nothing revolutionary, but should play well with the college crowd.

The other Johnson contribution, a nostalgic highlight called “17,” sees the Boys Like Girls frontman recycling ideas from his own music (“The Great Escape,” “Thunder,” and “The First Time” all come to mind), but the song’s small town summertime atmosphere is still nothing short of infectious. Similarly, the acoustic-based “Bitchin’ Summer” is Avril’s play for next year’s “ubiquitous song of the summer” title, and while it actually hits a lot of the same notes as “17” and “Here’s to Never Growing Up” (in less successful fashion, no less), it’s still not difficult to see the song revitalizing Lavigne’s image as a career hitmaker.

For its first four tracks, Avril Lavigne has a very distinct theme and style. “Rock N Roll,” “Here’s to Never Growing Up,” “17,” and “Bitchin’ Summer” are all songs about being young, wild, and crazy, about feeling infinite and acting like anything is possible. These are songs for college parties or summer bonfires in a post-high-school life, and while that kind of thematic territory might feel a bit bizarre for an artist who is almost 30, it’s still arguably the best decision this album makes. Songs like those four, derivative as they are, will always have an audience and will always be relatable, and if Avril Lavigne hewed closely to that same not-terribly-ambitious, but wholly enjoyable vein throughout, it would probably be Lavigne’s biggest and best record to date.

Instead, Avril Lavigne’s greatest strength and weakness is that it isn’t content to rest in the same vein for 13 straight tracks. Beyond the aforementioned pair of ill-advised duets, there’s nothing really “bad” here, but the album certainly loses steam when it trades the gentle wistfulness of songs like “17” and “Bitchin’ Summer” for the enjoyable but generic Katy Perry pop of “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” or “Sippin’ on Sunshine.” “Hello Heartache,” meanwhile, begins with a promising background vocal hook, recalling the baroque darkness of Florence + the Machine’s last record, but ends up getting grounded by another boring and generic chorus.

The biggest leap of faith is made on “Hello Kitty,” a trippy patchwork of EDM and pop that pays loving tribute to Lavigne’s sizable Japanese following. It’s a left-turn that most probably won’t appreciate (I myself probably won't ever listen to it again), but it briefly takes the album to an extremely adventurous and idiosyncratic place, single-handedly spicing up a dull midsection in the process. Unfortunately, the album gets less interesting as it goes, tapering off in disappointing fashion after a strong start. In other words, it’s not going to be a new favorite album for anyone other than Avril Lavigne’s most ardent admirers, but a handful of great summer mixtape songs and a few other exercises in mindless pop fun are still enough to make Avril Lavigne the eponymous singer’s best record in nine years. That might not be saying much, but it's a step in the right direction.

Train - California 37

Train - California 37

Columbia Records, 2012

Three stars

I can't say I've ever been a fan of Train, nor have I, until now, ever listened to a full-length album by them, but that hasn't stopped their long line of pop singles from managing to constantly pervade my everyday existence. From their breakout hits ("Meet Virginia" and "Drops of Jupiter," which were all over the place in my radio-listening days), to the singles from their third record, My Private Nation, which actually managed to make it onto a few mixes I burned for myself back in my pre-album listening phase ("Calling All Angels," "When I Look to the Sky"), all the way to the incredibly annoying cultural ubiquity of "Hey Soul Sister" back in 2010, which gave the band a renaissance of sorts, Train has managed to stick around, even as many of their early contemporaries have diminished in presence and disappeared. At very least, the San Francisco natives deserve a commendation for not only surviving, but thriving in a decade that largely rejected their brand of pop-rock. And despite the fact that I've never really liked this band, or that lead singer Pat Monahan's voice has always had a strong knack for getting on my nerves, the band's tendency to tour with some of my favorite guys making music today (Butch Walker, Matt Nathanson, Mat Kearney), has recently made me wonder if there's more to them than I thought; more than just the singles, at least.

Producer extraordinaire Butch Walker.

California 37, the band's sixth (!?) full length LP, finds them in the wake of their most successful hit ever, basking in the same brand of sunny hooks and shiny pop-production that made "Hey Soul Sister" such a success. And really, it's not so bad. Make no mistake, Train's music is just about as disposable as ever, but songs like opener "This'll Be My Year," which plays like a modern-day update on Billy Joel's  "We Didn't Start the Fire" (complete with a massive refrain-chorus), or the sweeping mid-tempo balladry of "We Were Made For This," which features one of Monahan's best vocal performances to date (at least that I've heard), as well as an explosive guitar solo mid-way through and a bizarre but atmospheric bagpipe outro, are pleasing and well-executed. If those two songs are among the best on the album, then it's hard to not see Butch Walker, who lends his writing talents to both, as one of the prime reasons. Walker, who has made a name for himself writing and producing for the likes of Avril Lavigne, Pink, and Weezer, knows his way around a hook better than just about anyone in the business today, and his fingerprints are all over this album, whether he's receiving writing credits or production kudos. Walker produced half the record himself, and shared duties with Espionage (the production duo who manned the boards for "Hey Soul Sister") for the rest, and throughout, he brings something to Train's music that has been lacking in the past. His presence is palpable on album closer "When the Fog Roles In," which recalls the band's '90s alt-rock roots, thanks to its piano-led orchestration and atmospheric flourishes of organ, brass, and guitar, or on the second single "Feels Good At First," whose pleasant acoustic-guitar loop and folk-pop aesthetic make for a song that wouldn't be so unwelcome as a dominating radio force.


 These songs were written and recorded while the band (and Walker) toured in support of their last album (2009's Save Me San Francisco), and as a result, they have a looser, more spontaneous feel to them than is usually present in modern pop music (Train's included). The cover depicts a classic car roaring down a sunlit highway, and that's fitting for a record that would be perfectly well suited for a spur-of-the-moment summertime road-trip: these songs are drenched in the kind of sunsoaked melodies that have formed the backbone for many a brilliant summer record, with hooks the size of houses and dynamic instrumentation. Songs like the pop-countrified "Bruises," complete with a guest vocal from country singer Ashley Monroe, or "Sing Together," which is essentially a rewrite of "Hey Soul Sister," right down to the chord progression and ukulele accompaniment, are poised to take over your local radio station this summer, while even the less commercially viable options are loaded with pop-sheen, from the Mariachi-influenced verses of "50 Ways to Say Goodbye" (and the skyscraping chorus they explode into), or the whistle-led "You Can Finally Meet My Mom," which is a lot of fun despite dumb lyrics.

But even despite Walker's welcome presence and a lot of enjoyable songs, Train are still the same band they've always been, and California 37 does end up falling into a lot of the same traps that have plagued most of their singles for the past fifteen years. Monahan stumbles upon a sincere line here and there, but for the most part, his lyrics are gimmicky and dumb, and in the worst cases, completely nonsensical. His songwriting partners (Walker and the guys from Espionage, among others) help to temper that habit on the album's best songs, but it's allowed to run wild on many of the album's more "commercial" tracks, and as a result, those end up bringing down a record that I actually could have seen myself listening to a lot this summer. First single "Drive By" is a particularly egregious offender ("When you move me, everything is groovy/They don't like it, sue me, mmm way you do me"), but drivel like "Mermaid" and the title track don't really help the band's case either. Monahan's pop music clichés and unfunny pop culture references extend beyond those three tracks, but in most cases, the melodies are strong enough to render them harmless. When Train is trying to play towards today's pop-music trends, they sound awkward and strained, and the results are as grating as the worst singles the genre has to offer; when they play it straight, they land somewhere between Counting Crows-lite and sugary pop singer/songwriters like Jason Mraz and Gavin DeGraw. Neither version is transcendent by any means, but overall, California 37 is a pleasant surprise from a band I've written off more times than I can count: it's disposable and largely forgettable, and it's not going to get anywhere near my end-of-the-year list, but it's fun, and every once in awhile, that's enough.