Content Nausea No. 30: Yonder Is Closer to the Heart
This thickness is just enough to wade through
Welcome to the 30th edition of Content Nausea. You can read No. 29 right here. Please let me know what you think. This is why you are here.
A good portion of Carly Rae Jepsen’s career has been predicated on lightning striking twice. “Call Me Maybe” became a smash in early 2012, and it led to a protracted album cycle and messy rollout of Kiss later that year. “Call Me Maybe” cracked the sky. The hope was that the rest of Kiss could follow it. The album did fine and peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard 200, largely buoyed by the success of its lead single, and it netted a score of 63 of out 100 on Metacritic.
A couple years later, Jepsen returned to the “Call Me Maybe” well with “I Really Like You,” the first single ahead of Kiss follow-up Emotion. The formula, despite a boost from a Tom Hanks cameo in the music video, did not hit at the same magnitude, and “I Really Like You” barely snuck into the top 40 at its peak.
In the aftermath of 2015’s stellar Emotion, an album that had its own arduous rollout, Jepsen returned suddenly with Emotion Side B. It was an instant success, a collection of eight songs that built on the ideas and themes of Emotion, and, in some cases, surpassed them. Releasing extras and loosies from studio sessions is not a new concept, but Jepsen wrapped it into a neat and brilliant package.
It also worked because Jepsen was an artist we wanted to hear more from. The flashes on Kiss, namely “Tiny Little Bows” and “This Kiss,” hint at something more. With three years between Kiss and Emotion and stories about a scrapped indie album circulating — Jepsen also apparently recorded and scrapped a disco album later on — Emotion Side B filled a need for Jepsen’s fan base and built on her profile as a critical darling post-Emotion. Lightning struck again.
So while last week’s Dedicated Side B was a “surprise” release to follow up last year’s Dedicated, how much of a surprise was it, really? Emotion laid a framework for Dedicated, and Jepsen attempted to capture that energy and success again. For the most part, Dedicated Side B succeeded in that.
But it is worth remembering that these are B-sides. There are reasons these 12 songs did not make the cut of Dedicated’s 15-song track list, much like “Store” was mercifully not included on Emotion. It leads to some clumsy moments.
In theory, the idea of using “Felt This Way” and “Stay Away” as a couplet is interesting. The two tracks share an identical running time (3 minutes, 37 seconds) and lyrics, with the first verse of “Felt This Way” spread across two verses in “Stay Away” and a pre-chorus used as a chorus in the latter. But the sounds contrast, with “Stay Away” serving as the more driving, uptempo and urgent companion to the languid “Felt This Way.”
But in practice, it makes for a bit of a disorienting album experience. During an active listen, the nuance might be simpler to see here, but in a passive listen, it misses the mark and leads to a little confusion. The risk is interesting, but it falls flat. Perhaps with better sequencing — something Dedicated struggled with, too, in front loading its singles — where the two tracks are separated and one is used as a callback later in the album, the impact could be greater. It’s one of the signposts that shows that these are indeed B-sides.
Still, neither “Felt This Way” nor “Stay Away” would have felt out of place on Dedicated. Neither would raucous opener “This Love Isn’t Crazy” nor the downtempo “Heartbeat,” which feels like a successor to Emotion standout “All That.” “This Is What They Say” would have paired nicely with “Everything He Needs” on Dedicated, too.
Elsewhere, though, Jepsen takes some sonic risks and tries out some different things. The driving bass line in “Summer Love” is an earworm that hearkens back to a song I can’t quite place, and it makes Jepsen a more passive vocalist floating above the rhythm section.
On “Let’s Sort This Whole Thing Out,” Jepsen dives headfirst into the world of jangle pop — one critic compared it to an early The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart track, and I actually thought it was the Bleachers collab during my first listen to the album — and the guitar line at the chorus would not sound out of place wafting from a Williamsburg practice space a decade ago. Jepsen is at her most excited on the record with the goal of having another drink and figuring out what exactly the situation is with her paramour.
The cast of characters we’re familiar with from the rest of Jepsen’s work returns here, too, most notably on “Comeback,” the collaboration with Bleachers’ Jack Antonoff. The well-traveled Antonoff is also credited as a writer and producer on opener “This Love Isn’t Crazy,” but his elevation to full-fledged featuring act as Bleachers on “Comeback” makes sense because the track does not sound like a Carly Rae Jepsen song. The warbling synths bubbling under the vocals feel like leftovers from Taylor Swift’s Lover, and it feels out of place to hear Jepsen sing a chorus that is ostensibly a sports metaphor. They do not feel like her words.
Antonoff is good at what he does, but he does it a lot, and at a certain point, there can be diminishing returns.
Blood Orange’s Devonté Hynes returns as a writer on “This Is What They Say,” while Ariel Rechtshaid has writer and producer credits on “Heartbeat,” cementing its connection to 2015’s “All That,” which was written and produced by Hynes and Rechtshaid with Jepsen.
There are other parallels to Jepsen’s previous work that showcase her persona in full bloom after more than eight years in the spotlight. On “Comeback,” Jepsen intones the word “boy” in the same coquetteish manner that can be heard all the way back to Kiss. In “Stay Away,” Jepsen sings, “I’ve only been thinking ’bout touch” and lets the -ch sound hang in the atmosphere. It invokes the chorus of 2015’s “Gimmie Love,” when she sings, “Gimmie touch / ’Cause I want what I want, do you think that I want too much?” with similar inflection, along with the chorus of Dedicated standout, “Too Much,” where Jepsen once again rhymes touch and much.
Like plenty of her pop contemporaries, Jepsen has overhauled her sound over the past decade, but she’s been masterful at keeping her personality consistent over the past three albums, assorted EPs and occasional one-off single.
This shines through when Dedicated Side B builds to its climax in the penultimate track, “Solo.” This is Jepsen at her best. She’s supportive in urging her heartbroken friend to avoid the trappings of loneliness and return to the dance floor and out into the world.
You let go, she moved on
A thousand stories before
You felt it, then lost it
You're lonely, your heart aches
But get yourself off the floor
I can't stand to see you cryingSo what you're not in love?
Don't go wasting your nights getting so low
So what you're not in love?
You shine bright by yourself dancing solo
The early success of “Call Me Maybe” pigeonhole Jepsen as a bit of a hopeless romantic, but her declarations of platonic love or philia are a staple of her discography. The post-chorus breakdown of “Solo” — although the generic, EDM-influenced type that is common across all pop music now — is the most cathartic moment of the album. It’s the part fo the concert where the confetti falls from the ceiling. It’s what everything has been building to, and then the damn breaks, creating a torrent that also wipes out forgettable album closer “Now I Don’t Hate California After All.”
Dedicated Side B makes for a compelling predecessor to its predecessor, and it helps to further flesh out a discography that has been hurt by mismanagement and baffling album rollouts. The bolt of lightning that was Emotion Side B is not eclipsed here. Instead, we got a collection that showcases Jepsen trying on different sounds and different vibes with varying degrees of success. The end result is what the title of the album states: Dedicated Side B.
Thank you for reading the 30th edition of Content Nausea. It will get better. Thank you, and see you soon.
Coffee breaks and lamb's tail shakes aren't arbitrary marks
Paycheck stubs, good sex and drugs can fade away distractions of the
Mantras of "keep going" that are lodged into my thoughts
They replay on days when yonder is closer to the heart
—D.G.