Age hits me a little harder for some of these albums than others. Blondshell is only eight years younger than me, but some of the stuff she's singing about feels younger. We find a lot of common ground, but there are other subjects that are alien due to the age difference. Gender difference too, I suppose, technically. But unlike some of her age-similar peers that we've come across in this godforsaken music club over the years, Blondshell wields her youth like a strength, and it helps me to connect to the lyrics. Sometimes, the naivete of youth repels me, and other times, it intrigues me. If You Asked for a Picture is absolutely the latter.
She's a good storyteller, is basically what I'm trying to say. I'm drawn into a world that a 36-year-old dude has no right to be in, and I'm fascinated with what she has to say. At 28, she's at the perfect age for this type of storytelling, too. It's old enough that you have years behind you, but young enough that you have plenty of years ahead of you. Blondshell is able to keep one eye on the past and one eye on the future. Any younger, like say she was a teenager, then it would be all future. Someone at my age tends to look toward the past.
Songs like "What's Fair" are obsessed with mistakes of the past, describing a toxic relationship from when she was way too young. Other songs seem more focused on what's to come, like "He Wants Me," whose droning '90s alt noise covers up the fact that this is unironically a happy song about what happens when you're in a relationship that feels safe and warm. There's also a through line of motherhood on the album, and that seems to cover both bases—not wanting to be a mother, and especially not wanting to be a mother too young, but also looking back and up toward her own mother, and how her perception of her "perfect" mother impacted her in good ways and bad.
I could say "I've heard this all before," and that would be true, but only because I'm old. Things that seem revelatory in your late 20s are positively banal in your mid-30s. Hearing it from Blondshell, though, and it feels fresh. That's because the songs are sharply and vividly written. Yes, I've heard a million fucking songs about motherhood before, but when I hear "23's a Baby," it doesn't feel cliché. That's what good songwriting does to an old idea—refurbishes, polishes, makes new. There are a billion songs about love in this universe, but the good ones stand out because they present love like an idea that no one's ever heard before. Blondshell does that here.
And she's doing all this on top of alt-indie-rock music that absolutely feels stale and overused. Which is fine, because I was not bored. But the music itself didn't do as much for me as the lyrics did. Blondshell is not the first person to the confessional storytelling over mid-tempo guitars, and she won't be the last. It's okay. I'm not enthralled by this music but I certainly don't hate it. I do get a little annoyed at how she holds out some of the words at the end of each line a little too long. Like maybe her vocals aren't the very best, and she tries to stretch it and it just rings flat to me. I don't know how to talk about vocal performances, so I'm kind of beating around the bush here. I'm mostly saying that her singing occasionally irked me, for intangible reasons.
That's really the only criticism I can give here. The fact that the music sounds like a bunch of other shit I already listen to... I mean, that's the case a lot these days, because very rarely does the world actually hear a "new sound." Most of the best music takes music that existed before it, and repurposes it in new and exciting ways. On Sunday, we celebrated Mother's Day at my sister-in-law's house, listening to what I will assume was an algorithm playlist based on the War on Drugs. So it was 40% WoD and the rest was songs within that genre of heartland rock. My father-in-law was grumbling the whole time about how "all of this music sounds the same." I mean, he wasn't technically wrong. That is, after all, the purpose of the algorithm—to take what it knows you know, and give you even more of it. But beyond my own constant grumbling about the state of computer-generated playlists, let's acknowledge that it's okay to "sound the same" as something else. Maybe I like grunge-infused indie rock with female vocals. Why wouldn't I like something that sounds like the other music that I already like in that vein?
Especially if the artist is using the sounds you already know to tell a new story, which is happening here. Something like "Event of a Fire" feels positively riveting to me. "We're passing New Jersey’s Tony Soprano memorial cеnter / And it feels like the morning wе went to the car and I followed him on a tether / Like I'm sixteen / Part of me really left her she was never found / Part of me still sits at home in a panic over fifteen pounds." These are a lot of specific details, and I feel confused by some of them (e.g. wait, is their actually a memorial to Tony Soprano in NJ?). But if I don't know exactly what the specifics are, the emotions evoked are clear and transparent and memorable. I can see how a landmark might trigger a vague memory which then leads to a retraumatizing of a feeling that you felt back then. 28 is young enough that you can remember sixteen. 36 is too old to remember sixteen. But 28 can pass the baton back to 36, paint a more vivid picture for me than I ever could at this age. That panic that she's singing about? Yeah, I get it now. That's real.
I have never heard Blondshell's self-titled debut, but I get the sense that this one is a little slower, a little deeper. I was definitely expecting something a little truer to alt-rock roots, as opposed to this alt-rock-tinged pop balladry, basically. She's a lot closer on the spectrum to Olivia Rodrigo than Hole. I would've preferred more Rockin' Out, if I'm being honest, but you get what you get. I will say that maybe it sounds like Blondshell is still figuring out their sound. Recall that the self-titled's rigor was a pivot to begin with, from her original true pop push. After listening to If You Asked for a Picture, I have confidence that Blondshell is gonna be okay in whatever genre she finally makes her home. She's pretty young, she's got plenty of time.
GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5
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