(Courtesy of Interscope 2020)
By: Jacob Stewart
Rare has some really good lyrics from Selena Gomez, but they’re interspersed through some of the most generic pop songs imaginable.
I really want to like “Lose You To Love Me”, but to me it just falls flat with the echoing that makes it sound more like imaginary melodrama or just too… easy to be emotional to make me feel anything. It actually sucks that the most raw songs on the album suffer from just not really sounding like it’s sincere, something it shares with Halsey’s Manic. There’s also some cognitive dissonance throughout the album, where Selena is trying to point herself as learning from her mistakes in terms of love and relationships, but makes the same jokes and surface-level “love boys” reminiscent of Disney-era Selena. She never puts her foot forward all the way, like she’s tip-toeing across the doorway.
The funny thing is, there isn’t a single bad song on this album. At worst, it’s boring, but it never actually gets grating. What Selena Gomez ends up lacking? Identity. Her best songs, the self titled “Rare” and the absolute banger “Dance Again” sound like something any pop artist could make. You would never know it’s a Selena Gomez song except for the timbre of her vocals, not the personality of it. And when you do recognize her for the personality of her vocals, it’s not in a good way (cough Fun cough). That being said, if you want any song to take away from this, Dance Again should be on your playlist immediately.
Even the features kinda phone it in. Kid Cudi sounds nice on A Sweeter Place, but he’s sounded nicer (although the song is this close to being a good song, it’s not Cudi that’s getting it there). 6LACK almost ruins the song they feature on, “Crowded Room”. The other songs are a mess of just having potential that goes nowhere, which might have something to do with just… Selena sounding fake.
There are a ton of producers on this. Tons. Someone put it best that the album sounds sanitized. It’s old “safe” pop. Unfortunate coming from Selena.
