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| Creative Stagnation! The Musical |
Emilie Autumn's had a lot of problems in her life, you know. I know this because she pours out her difficulties in her music, turning her lyrics into a confessional stream of cathartic anger, violence and righteous fury. In theory. In practice, I listened to her previous album, Opheliac, and found it to be a rather enjoyable album, even if the lyrics were my least favourite part of it. Ms. Autumn has, if I may be blunt about it, no finesse. She seemed to have no concept of making lyrics more vague and therefore, more relatable and profound. But this was something I could easily overlook, because the music, a combination of romanticised Steampunk British Victoriana and industrial/electronica, was innovative and skillfully implemented and good gothic fun, if you didn't mind the ham-handedness or repetitiveness of the words.
So now we've got Fight Like A Girl, which Emilie Autumn's website proudly announces is musical theatre, and damn proud of it. Well, I'm not really a fan of musical theatre, Ms. Autumn. And good thing too, because if I were looking for musical theatre, I'd be a little bit disappointed with this cack-handed, stupid, insulting pantomime.
Things get off to a flying start with the title track, which has a synth bass riff remarkably redolent of "Misery Loves Company" off her previous, more enjoyable album. It has a chorus about annihilating 49% of humanity, which flows terribly, and it's about a minute and a half too long. Not great. Not a bad song, mind you, but not great. Which is a crying shame, because it's all downhill from there.
The problem with Emilie Autumn, as far as I can see it, is that although her "Victoriandustrial" style is interesting, and has a lot of potential, she doesn't seem to know what to do with it. Her violin work is excellent, but it takes a back seat on this album, to make way for songs that are written with Broadway in mind, but sit rather uncomfortably on a quote-unquote "rock" album. The songs show a rather annoying lack of natural progression, and the bad habit of repeating a lyrical witticism until all wit and meaning to the phrase that was the occasional fly in the ointment on the last album ("You're so easy to read, but the book is boring me") is back again, on pretty much every song.
So, Ms. Autumn, if I may speak directly:
I know you can do better than this. You've shown so much potential. Laced/Unlaced was a great album. Opheliac had some absolutely brilliant songs (the execrably bad "I Know Where You Sleep" notwithstanding), there were flashes of truly profound lyricism, such as "Thank God I'm Pretty" and "Let The Record Show" was an excellent industrial song. Fight Like A Girl, by contrast, seems to have taken the previous album and stripped out, for the most part, the Gothic aroma, the literary-mindedness, and replaced it with a Broadway musical sensibility which is at best tacky and at worst comes across as selling out really hard.
The Steampunk style, which you, with your first few releases, gave such a timely Victorian Gothic-Revival spin on, is something with vast potential that always seems frustrated. Some luminaries have taken advantage of it, for instance Dr. Steel, whose entire output is a bald-headed barrel of fun. Johnny Hollow are just as good. Your Victorian Nightmare Asylum aesthetic, with its rats and leeches and white coats and harpsichords and righteous insanity, is so wonderfully evocative. There are so few artists these days willing to commit themselves so wholeheartedly to a well-thought-through image, which is such a huge part of rock n' roll. With this album, you do yourself an enormous disservice.
3/10
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