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Doja Cat’s raspy rap at the very end of “Motive” feels strangely more like a coda than an integrated verse, but that’s not really a detriment to a song that quickly picks up the album’s pace and then efficiently makes its exit. Standouts include all three of the tracks with featured appearances. The cellos, violas and violins add up to a great flavor in a good number of tracks here, from that first song to the finale, “POV,” a number with a slightly gospel-y undertone harking back to a different kind of classic, earnest R&B balladry than the friskier kind that fills out most of the album. Light orchestration or a strings-like sound is definitely on the rebound lately in R&B because of that whole neo-disco renaissance, but Grande and her producers are using what sometimes amounts to a 13-piece string section in more interesting and nuanced ways than that. Musically, it’s on solid ground right from the start, as the opening “Shut Up” does strongly benefit not just from Grande’s talent for arranging her own stacked vocals, but from a use of strings that will occur throughout the album. “Just Like Magic,” Grande’s paean to the Law of Attraction, comes off as a little lopsidedly entitled for the year of BLM and COVID: “I get everything I want ‘cause I attract it” is a message that maybe could have been saved for a year other than 2020.īut these aren’t major missteps, and the album finds a surer footing shortly in. “34 + 35,” which immediately follows, is, let’s face it, a little bit on the schoolgirl-sniggering side. The opening “Shut Up,” a self-explanatory message to Grande’s questioners and detractors - and the only non-relationship-minded tune in the set - is a lot of fun musically, but its defensive message would not bear belaboring. That’s not to say that there isn’t a hierarchy of tracks on the record.
#Shes a quiet storm full#
It’s full of expertly conceived songs you wish would at least try to overstay their welcome, though there’s never any real regret when she hits the “Thank u, next” button to move on to a successor.= And “Positions” benefits from that economy and repeatability.
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In the aforementioned “34 + 35,” Grande extols the merits of duration, singing, “Can you stay up all night? F- me until the daylight” - but when it comes to music these days, Grande is all about the quickies. If you caught Grande’s last tour, you know that she already has a tendency to condense songs to their core, but if she condenses these the next time around, you might actually blink and miss them.
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The longest song, “Off the Table,” stretches itself to exactly four minutes, and that’s just to give that song’s duet partner, The Weeknd, nearly equal time. Of the 14 tracks, a majority, eight, clock in at under three minutes - a length that’d count as an interlude on just about anybody else’s contemporary album. You may find yourself doing the math in other ways, listening to “Positions,” because it’s an album that adheres to the leave-‘em-wanting-more maxim to such an extreme that you might be looking up the actual lengths of the songs more than once. Give her credit for coming up with a very analog symbol for looking for love in a song that’s throwback in more ways than one. (It’s not the only time she visits that subject on the album “Love Language” is not actually about her significant other being multilingual.) On a more innocent but equally playful level, “6:30” has her repeatedly asking, “Are you down? What’s up?” - with the title phrase meant to signify the moment when both hands on the clockface are, you know, down with that. Along with the sexy time and tentative steps back toward re-embracing romanticism in full, there will be arithmetic, even though, in one outro, Grande murmurs, “Math class - never was good.” The woman doth protest too much about her lack of skills: “34 + 35” naughtily adds up to exactly what you think it adds up to … and she does literalize the addition at the very end of the track, unnecessarily, in case anyone missed the joke.