Review Summary: Average is the only word to describe the debut album of Amanda Blank
Amanda Mallory, a young and feisty rapper known for her numerous collaborations with electronic artists like M.I.A and Santigold is a hot new thing in the underground electro-rap scene. In 2009 Mallory went to work at creating her own album, to be named,
I Love You. Electro-rap is such a touchy genera in the sense that it comes down to being either really good, or really awful in most scenarios.
I Love You could be considered a rarity in that case being that it lands right in the middle being downright average. Some songs are catchy and fun, while others leave the listener just as Mallory’s stage name would suggest…blank.
Beginning with the fast opener
Make It Take It consists of multiple layers of vocals that tend to flow well until midway into the song when it sounds more like a jumbled mess of speaking the lines, “I’m a make it take girl”. Not consisting of much more lines than that the song is fairly boring with her drab vocals that sound like she recorded the song half awake,
Make It Take It is not the best introduction to what Mallory can do.
Something Bigger, Something Better is much better quality than the first, but features no singing, just rapping. The beat is simple and clean flowing well with the rapping, that is done fairly well, but still not top notch. Following is the incredibly horrendous song,
Make-Up. Easily the worst song on
I Love You,
Make-Up has no real substance to it. The vocals, neither rapping nor singing, are more like a narration of a girl getting ready in the morning set to a beat.
After breaking away from the weakness of
Make-Up, the following track
Gimme What You Got is the most high energy song on the album. The rapping is very strong, the song is extremely fun and catchy with the lines, “hottest mother***er on the whole damn block” repeated numerous times. The biggest difference between
Gimme What You Got and the rest of the songs is that its recorded with quality, and is the only track thus far into the album that could be taken seriously. Departing from the rapping for a track the album continues to the song
Shame On Me, another strong track with a straightforward beat, focusing more on vocals than anything else. This is the first song that really shows off Mallory’s singing, and overall is average, but still listenable.
Mixing romantic lyrics with rapping creates Mallory’s
A Love Song. The track could be great but unfortunately is not. The rapping is the best it can be on this album but in the background, there is a repeated high vocal singing “oh” every two seconds in the song making it very annoying and distracting from what the song is trying to say, which really much is not to begin with.
The only thing on this album that could really be considered “great” is the track,
Might Like You Better, an unbearably catchy rap song, with layers upon layers of vocals, some low pitched, others high pitched overall equaling out to a very entertaining song. While good,
Might Like You Better cannot save this album for it has already dived too deep into a pit of sheer average beats, singing, and rapping. Good for maybe one listen or two,
I Love You will not be the next big thing in the clubs, and if Amanda Blank continues making albums like this, neither will she.
