Review Summary: Fallenmania, Part 12
This is a rather special album: it’s the series’ first album in my mother tongue, and it’s part of its own little sub-genre, known as emo r’n b. It does sound like a lot of French r’n b, but it clearly owes more to “Fallen” than to any 90s emo or 2000s pop punk. As absurd as this fusion of styles would seem, this album is fairly solid, most of the time.
Some context to know how we got here: France has had a r’n b scene since the 90s, but it really blew up in the 2000s, getting so popular among teenagers that it basically was pop music. If you wanted your music to be a hit with a young audience, you had to tie it to the r’n b scene in some way. But the whole emo movement also got really big among teens in the late 2000s, to the point where any kid who looked a little alternative, any rock band that had a young audience, was called emo by people who didn’t know their rock subcultures. So, depending how you look at it, it was only a matter of time before r’n b, emo music, and all the stuff that got lumped in with those, would come together, or before record executives would try to cash in on those two things that kids like these days.
Jena Lee, the artist in charge of this improbable fusion, is a studio-songwriter-turned-singer, who made two albums before going back behind the scenes. So she has a lot in common with other artists discussed in this series, and she seems to be connected to everyone in the music industry. Just like Kerli is a cartoon goth, she’s a cartoon emo girl, sometimes literally, as seen in her animated music videos. You may find it forced and gimmicky, or be really into that. But enough history lessons, what actually works about her second album “Ma Référence”, and what doesn’t?
“Mon Ange” is a great opener to the album, and a great example of its style. It’s a piano ballad with Going Under riffs, and edgy, pseudo-poetic lyrics about wanting a bad boy to be bad to her, but it has such a hauntingly sad and beautiful melody that I mostly feel sorry for the narrator of the song, rather than wanting to make fun of her. It also showcases her unique, whispery-to-loud voice. “Éternise-moi” is another beautiful melancholic rock sound, and a pretty good duet with a band oh-so-cleverly called Eskemo.
It could be the album’s “Bring me to Life”. Jena has better chemistry with Eskemo’s singer than Amy Lee had with Paul McCoy, and definitely more than she has with that guy on the more generic rock song “Je m’Ennuie”, and with Orelsan on “Je Rêve en Enfer”, where she plays the girl desperately in love with the wrong guy, and he plays the guy who doesn’t care about her. They don’t sound all that good together, which is a shame because the song’s synth-and-guitars instrumentation is pretty good otherwise. In the same vein of disappointing songs, “Ma Référence” is a generic ballad with the same notes, same vague guitar background as many others. The song’s sweetness is its only saving grace. It’s sad that the title track is really not the most memorable song on the album.
“Le Temps” has a pretty good instrumentation in the same vein, and more personal, less cliché lyrics about a fear of growing old. “Âme Soeur” is a straight up r’n b song, about a much more honest and unusual topic: a friend who’s so close to her he’s like a soulmate, but they don’t need to be anything more than that. This song is everything “Je Rêve” isn’t. You just don’t get enough songs about how a friendship is just as important as a romance, if not more, and how a girl and guy can be just friends, no drama about it. By contrast, “Mon Délire” is a more rocking tune, with a nice riff, and unfortunately, lyrics that, if released today, would get her accused of being “not like other girls”. In a similar vein, “Ne me Réveille Pas” is a sort of Linkin-Park-without-guitar song about how she’s too quirky to get up in the morning, I guess.
Basically, a lot of the songs have obvious flaws, and yet, something nice to make them at least a little enjoyable. Jena’s biggest problem, aside from the pseudo-edgy lyrics, is that while she obviously knows how to write a catchy tune, she tends to use the same melodies and instrumentations all the time. For example, the title track is generic like I said, “J’Oublie” sounds like everything else on the album, but at least catchy. However, there’s one song I just can’t get past. “U.S Boy” sticks out like a sore thumb here, because it’s more poppy and upbeat, but because its lyrics are such a bunch of clichés about how all French girls fantasize about American boys, who really must live like in Hollywood movies. I get second-hand embarrassment from those lyrics and that music video where Jena plays the stereotypical emo high school girl, when she was 23 years old. But she’s enough of a good songwriter than the chorus still gets stuck in your head.
And that sums up my feeling on this album, and Jena Lee’s career as a whole. Yes, she’s clearly cashing in on trends that don’t go together, yes, her persona feels contrived and inauthentic, which is my problem with a lot of fallenmaniac albums. For some reasons, there are a lot of mainstream pop-based fallenmaniac albums. That stuff is bound to feel like a dumbed down version of its inspiration, a hyper-simplified caricature of Amy Lee without the creativity or authenticity, if you don’t do it 100% right, and like I said, this album has plenty of very apparent flaws. It’s not as creative as “Love is Dead”, and not as well-made as “Breakaway”. I couldn’t really say I loved it. But it was definitely better than I expected, there are some definitely good songs even though the album isn’t perfect. I would never consider Jena Lee one of the greatest artists of all time, but I find her interesting due to her strange career arc, connections to the music industry and unexpected similarities to other artists in this series. Fallenmaniacs are by definition derivative, but they usually sound good. At least many of them do, but that’s for another day.
