For You Illustrates The Inconsistent Musical Career Of Selena Gomez!

The Good: A couple fun songs, Hints of vocal prowess
The Bad: Short, Unremarkable remixes, Lame dance tracks, Overproduced
The Basics: For You is a surprisingly unremarkable compilation album for Selena Gomez & The Scene!


It has been a long time since I chose an Artist Of The Month and managed to get through the entire library of that artist's works in the month. I chose Selena Gomez as my September Artist Of The Month and immersed myself in her works - both as a solo artist and with her earlier works with her band The Scene. I am capping off my musical exploration of the works of Selena Gomez with her compilation For You and putting in that album made me realize that before the month of study began, I had only heard two singles from Selena Gomez. The second song I (apparently) knew coming into the month was the track produced explicitly for For You, the single "The Heart Wants What It Wants." If my previous experience is any indication, by the third track of For You the average listener who heard the works of Selena Gomez on the radio will have their familiarity with the works on the compilation album exhausted.

For You follows a fairly new trend in compilation albums - especially when those conglamorated albums are released early in the career of the musical artist - in that it does not simply include the standard studio releases for all of the songs. Instead, several of the songs are remixes and there is at least one Spanish language version of a previously-released track. As well, For You is a blend of songs from Selena Gomez's solo work and her work as the lead singer for Selena Gomez & The Scene.

With fifteen songs clocking out at 51:52, For You is actually longer than many of Selena Gomez's other albums. Selena Gomez is the lead singer on all of the tracks, but she had limited creative control over For You. Gomez co-wrote only two of the songs, she does not play any instruments on the album and was not credited as producing any of the songs. As a result, For You mostly showcases Selena Gomez's talents as a performer.

Most of the songs on For You are culled from Selena Gomez's dance hits, despite opening with the ballad "The Heart Wants What It Wants" and including the more inspirational anthem "Who Says." The bulk of the musical accompaniment for Selena Gomez on For You is fairly generic dance-pop and some of the songs are catchy, like "Love You Like A Love Song," but others are entirely forgettable like "Round & Round."

Vocally, For You manages to pick some decent songs that showcase some of Selena Gomez's singing talents. Gomez has decent range and can sing pretty fast and articulately on some of her song. But there are very few songs that allow Selena Gomez to explore her range and are produced to have a natural quality that plays well to the earnest quality of the lyrics she sings. "The Heart Wants What It Wants" is an excellent example of a song where the vocals have minimal production elements infused to obscure or alter Selena Gomez's voice; "My Dilemma 2.0" is an excellent example of how a song can be produced to make the instrumental accompaniment compete with the vocals.

Lyrically, most of the songs are about relationships, including "The Heart Wants What It Wants." To be fair, For You illustrates well how unfortunate it is that Selena Gomez is not more involved in the creative side of her own works. When Gomez sings the lines "The bed's getting cold and you're not here / The future that we hold is so unclear / But I'm not alive until you call / And I'll bet the odds against it all / Save your advice 'cause I won't hear / You might be right but I don't care / There's a million reasons why I should give you up / But the heart wants what it wants" ("The Heart Wants What It Wants"), which she co-wrote, it illustrates a real lyrical talent.

Usually, with a compilation album, I come to a point where I either recommend it as a substitute for the albums that it compiles from (there is a Fleetwood Mac compilation album, for example, that makes Tango In The Night irrelevant by including all of its great tracks without any of its filler!) or point out that it is just a cashgrab that unimaginatively puts together most of the material that other albums already possessed. With For You, I find myself at the odd position of feeling neither. Indeed, at least until the point where For You was produced, the entire musical career of Selena Gomez has seemed like a cashgrab lacking in creativity. The compilation came far too early in the career of Selena Gomez to be only her essential works and while "The Heart Wants What It Wants" is a decent song, it is not enough to justify paying for the filler and familiar tracks that follow it.

The best songs are "The Heart Wants What It Wants" and "Who Says;" "Forget Forever" (Remix) is probably the low point of For You.

For other works with Selena Gomez, please visit my reviews of:
The Fundamentals Of Caring
Revival (Deluxe Edition)
The Big Short
Hotel Transylvania 2
Behaving Badly
Stars Dance
Hotel Transylvania
When The Sun Goes Down - Selena Gomez & The Scene
A Year Without Rain - Selena Gomez & The Scene
Kiss & Tell - Selena Gomez & The Scene
Horton Hears A Who!

3/10

For a comrehensive listing of all of my music reviews, please check out my Music Review Index Page where the artists and their albums are easily organized!

© 2016 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Teen Pop-Rock Generica: Kiss & Tell Fails To Thrill!

The Good: Catchy tunes, Listenable, Moments of voice
The Bad: Overproduced, Repetitive, Some truly lame rhymes, Short
The Basics: Kiss & Tell was the musical debut of Selena Gomez & The Scene . . . and it is pretty surprising there was ever a follow-up!


It is always very interesting to me to see who is able to successfully traverse one medium to another - like singers who show genuine talent for acting or actors who make magnificent directors or writers who prove they have the chops to executive produce a television show that is consistently great. Selena Gomez got her start as a child actor, arguably because she was on kids shows and had a very natural "cute" factor that got her foot in the door. But, as her tenure on the Disney Channel came toward an end, Selena Gomez - like Miley Cyrus before her - made the transition from child actress to young pop star. The debut album of Selena Gomez & The Scene was Kiss & Tell.

Kiss & Tell is a debut album full of rookie mistakes that achieved some measure of commercial success arguably because it was exceptionally well-promoted at the time. Had Selena Gomez not been associated with the Disney brand, the Disney Channel and ABC probably would not have utilized their influence to push the product and the album would have been forgotten with the one-hit wonders and the could-have-beens. But in the final analysis, Kiss & Tell feels much more like a product than it does a musical expression or anything truly artistic.

With only thirteen songs, totaling 42:20, Kiss & Tell is very short. Selena Gomez & The Scene are responsible for co-writing only two of the tracks. Gomez provides all of the lead vocals and some of the backing vocals, while members of The Scene play the primary instruments, which are guitar, bass, keyboards and drums. Kiss & Tell feels like a product in that most of the songs have multiple producers and engineers and the album has a hodgepodge sound to it that seems to be the result of it lacking an executive producer that had a clear musical concept for the album. Kiss & Tell is the musical shotgun approach to attempting to make hit pop songs.

Musically, Kiss & Tell is largely an album filled with very generic pop-rock songs. While the album begins with "Kiss & Tell," a song that sounds like it could have come from pretty much any garage rock band, most of the album treads more toward pop. Indeed, only "Crush" stands out as having similar noticeable guitarwork that promotes the instrumentation with a tune and a sense of edge to it. Kiss & Tell is a mix of rock, pop and one or two tracks (like "Tell Me Something I Don't Know") that try to edge closer to hip-hop. Kiss & Tell, predictably, does not have a cohesive overall sound.

"I Promise You" has good vocals that promote Selena Gomez's natural voice, but not her range. In fact, outside only one real stretch for a high note in "Crush," Gomez plays it musically safe and many of the producers obscure her natural vocals with production elements. Even the ballad "The Way I Loved You" drowns out Gomez's vocals at some of her most raw moments! Kiss & Tell does not present any truly audacious or musically interesting vocals.

On the lyrical front, Kiss & Tell is something of a mess. The album has some moments and Selena Gomez is actually singing some of what she knows by singing about young love on some of the songs. On "I Promise You," Gomez creates an effortless sound and there is something authoritative in the earnestness of her delivery. When Gomez sings "They say that we're just too young / To know / But I'm sure heart and soul / That I am never letting you go / When it's right it's right / And this is it / 'Cause I'm walking on air / Every single time that we kiss" ("I Promise You"), the listener believes the singer has a clear idea of what she is singing about.

But Kiss & Tell is plagued by songs with terrible, predictable rhymes. The poetics of "I picked you out in a crowd of a thousand faces / Yea, I found you oooooooo / I chose the whys and the whens all the random places . . . Well you think you are the one who got me boy / But I got u / I've been playing with you like a lil toy" ("I Got U") were stale long before Selena Gomez & The Scene used them!

The other real mark against the writing on Kiss & Tell is its duration. Most of the songs are in the three minute range, but they utilize a lot of repetition. For example, the word "more" appears in the song "More" at least 34 times in a song about three and a half minutes in duration! There is a mind-numbing quality to the repetition in the song and it is not the only song that suffers from repetition problems.

Ultimately, Kiss & Tell is an entirely unremarkable debut for Selena Gomez & The Scene. It is a product that started Selena Gomez down the path to be a popular icon and a cash cow for big corporations, but it lacks any of the artistry and talent that later works by Selena Gomez exhibited. The best track is "I Promise You," the low point is "More."

For other works with Selena Gomez, please visit my reviews of:
The Fundamentals Of Caring
Revival (Deluxe Edition)
The Big Short
Hotel Transylvania 2
Behaving Badly
Stars Dance
Hotel Transylvania
When The Sun Goes Down - Selena Gomez & The Scene
A Year Without Rain - Selena Gomez & The Scene
Horton Hears A Who!

4/10

To see how this album stacks up against every other musical work I have reviewed, please check out my Music Review Index Page where the reviews are organized best to worst rated!

© 2016 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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The Rare Album That Gets Better As It Goes On: A Year Without Rain

The Good: Moments of voice, Moments of lyrics
The Bad: SHORT, Derivative, Overproduced
The Basics: The deluxe edition of A Year Without Rain is fractured and mostly disappointing, but the best tracks are not the ones up front!


In my study of musical artists over the last few years, I have come to find that one of the true, simple, joys in life is the thrill of discovery. In recent years, I have listened to quite a bit of music without any prior knowledge of what I will encounter. Ironically, I can recall the first time as an adult that I picked up an album without knowing a single single or the artist on the album and I know that at the time I did not realize just how much I had lucked out with the album being one that was truly great in its own right. But, years of musical studies of albums that have included numerous artists with whom I only had an initial passing familiarity has led me to see some patterns in the mainstream music industry. One of the patterns, especially in pop-rock albums, is frontloading; albums that put the marketable singles right up front and allow the musical experience to turn into auditory slush as the album goes on. There are very few successful musical artists or acts that do not present an album in that fashion; it is a very rare thing when an album gets better after the first few songs and finishes stronger than it begins.

A Year Without Rain is one of those rare exceptions.

Opening with the insipid, repetitive, pop song "Round & Round," A Year Without Rain gets off to a terrible start. And while the listener is lulled into a false sense of security by the title track as song number 2 (a song with decent lyrics and moments of voice from lead singer Selena Gomez, but with a forced dance pop tempo), the listener's hopes are dashed when that song is followed up with "Rock God" and the equally horrible "Off The Chain." But then something good happens around track seven, "Spotlight;" Selena Gomez & The Scene take the album in a more palatable direction and the songs become surprisingly good.

With thirteen tracks on the deluxe edition of A Year Without Rain, Selena Gomez & The Scene present an erratic, short, and repetitive album. Even the deluxe version ofA Year Without Rain is short as it clocks out at 45:47 and while it is longer than the original, it is fluffed out with three remixes of two of the songs from the base album, adding nothing substantively new to the musical experience. The short duration of A Year Without Rain might well reflect how little creative influence the Selena Gomez & The Scene had in the album's production; they are entirely relegated to performers on the album. Selena Gomez provides all the lead vocals (save the opening rap on "Intuition") and The Scene plays the musical instruments for the songs that are not programmed, but none of the members of the group so much as co-wrote any of the ten songs and they were not involved in the album's production, either. As a result, A Year Without Rain has the sound and feeling of being an album assembled as a studio cashgrab as opposed to an artistic endeavor.

The deluxe edition of A Year Without Rain is homogeneously pop music, most of which is designed for danceability as opposed to creating memorable tunes. Percussion and synthesizers dominate most of the deluxe edition of A Year Without Rain. There are no truly memorable musical moments on A Year Without Rain.

Selena Gomez's natural singing voice seldom comes through on A Year Without Rain. While "Intuition" allows her voice to be clearly, she plays off a very bland rap, which feels very forced on the album. "Intuition" is followed by "Spotlight," one of the tracks where Gomez's voice is most notably altered by production elements. But "Spotlight" is an interesting transition for A Year Without Rain because after a number of indistinct, generic-sounding pop songs, Selena Gomez starts to sound like Avril Lavigne. It is a somewhat shocking musical transition that leads to Gomez's natural voice breaking through on "Ghost Of You." "Ghost Of You" illustrates Gomez's vocal range and lung capacity in a way more compelling than the lyrics.

That is not to say "Ghost Of You" is not one of the better-written songs on A Year Without Rain. "Ghost Of You" is one of the tracks with a fairly universal message as Selena Gomez sings about the agony of the loss of innocence and the power of negative experiences. Indeed, she does not hint at all at her youth when she sings "And I'll never be like I was / The day I met you / Too naive, yes I was / Boy that's why I let you in / Wear your memory like a stain / Can't erase or numb the pain / Here to stay with me forever" ("Ghost Of You").

A Year Without Rain does not simply focus on relationships. Selena Gomez & The Scene present an album with a positive tone when it comes to interacting with the larger world. "Intuition" is focused on being the best one can be and with lines like "Believe in what we feel inside / Believe and it will never die / Don't never let this life pass us by / Live like there's no tomorrow," "Live Like There's No Tomorrow" encourages listeners to make the most out of life. These are good messages and they are presented well-enough to be heard.

Unfortunately, the process of getting to the good lines is an often agonizing one. Most of the songs are disturbingly repetitive, starting with "Round & Round." It is hard to see what the message Selena Gomez & The Scene wanted their listeners to get out of songs like "Off The Chain." With the frequent refrain of "A thousand church bells ringing / I can hear the angels singing / When you call my name / Your love is off the chain" ("Off The Chain") before the title is repeated ad nauseaum, the song is just bad and singing to the lowest common denominator of youth culture.

Despite the fact that A Year Without Rain generally gets better in its latter half, it is still a disappointing album that is impossible to recommend.

The best song is "Ghost Of You," the low point is "Rock God" (though the remix of "Round & Round" that appears near the end of the Deluxe edition is not doing the album any proud service!).

For other works with Selena Gomez, please visit my reviews of:
The Fundamentals Of Caring
Revival (Deluxe Edition)
The Big Short
Hotel Transylvania 2
Behaving Badly
Stars Dance
Hotel Transylvania
When The Sun Goes Down - Selena Gomez & The Scene
Horton Hears A Who!

3/10

To see how this album stacks up against every other musical work I have reviewed, please check out my Music Review Index Page where the reviews are organized best to worst rated!

© 2016 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Average, Not At All Awful: When The Sun Goes Down Is A Decent Album!

The Good: Some catchy tunes, Moments of vocals, Moments of theme
The Bad: Short, Frontloaded, Overproduced in places, Some unimpressive lyrics
The Basics: When The Sun Goes Down is a fun pop-dance album that is listenable, even if it is not great.


I have a feeling that everyone has some people they know of far better than they actually know, especially with the plethora of celebrities, musical artists and genuine actors working in the world today. For example, to the best of my knowledge, I have never seen any sort of performance or program that features any member of the Kardashian family from Keeping Up With The Kardashians, yet I'd lay fairly decent odds that I might be able to pick out a Kardashian on a magazine cover while at the grocery store. Until I made Selena Gomez my September Artist Of The Month, I was unsure that I had even heard one of her songs before, but I recognized her very easily. That sense that I had no rational reason to recognize Selena Gomez was reinforced when I listened to both of Gomez's solo albums - Revival (reviewed here!) and Stars Dance (reviewed here!) - and did not know any of the songs. That changed, though, when I started listening to the Selena Gomez & The Scene album When The Sun Goes Down.

When The Sun Goes Down is the Selena Gomez & The Scene album that opens with "Love You Like A Love Song," a very catchy dance-pop track that I heard on my last cross-country trip a lot. The song "Whiplash" sounded ridiculously familiar, too, but it turns out that was because it was co-written by Britney Spears and sounds exactly like what one might expect of one of her songs (especially from the era in which it was written!). When The Sun Goes Down is not a bad album, but it is very much what one expects from a dance-pop album, including being frontloaded to include the best, most catchy dance and pop numbers on the album's first half before descending into utterly forgettable songs on the latter half.

With twelve tracks, eleven songs (track 12 is a Spanish language version of the song "Who Says," which appears earlier on the album: "Dices"), When The Sun Goes Down is very short at only forty minutes long (I couldn't get the Deluxe Edition with its additional tracks, but considering they were just remixes of "Love You Like A Love Song," I don't feel like I am missing anything. When The Sun Goes Down was very much a studio creation: Gomez is the only member of the musical group who is credited as even a co-writer and only on two of the eleven songs. Selena Gomez provides all of the lead vocals and the members of the band The Scene appear to play all of the important instruments on the album. But many of the songs have electropop and dance influences, which prioritize production of the music over instrumentation and, as a result, the laundry list of producers involved with When The Sun Goes Down appear to have more musical influence over the album than Selena Gomez and/or The Scene. The result is an album where Selena Gomez & The Scene seems to have limited creative control over their creation, which might be why this was their last full studio album together.

Instrumentally, When The Sun Goes Down is dominated by synths and drums, which creates a very danceable sound most of the songs. This creates some interesting auditory discontinuities, most notably on "Middle Of Nowhere," which has a danceable beat and an up-tempo musical accompaniment to lyrics about heartbreak and abandon. In a similar way, the hypnotic, beat-driven sound of "Love You Like A Love Song" is hardly an embodiment of romance in musical form. That said, "We Own The Night" is one of the best, most memorable sounding pop-rock tracks from Selena Gomez's career - with or without The Scene.

Vocally, Selena Gomez has very few opportunities to show off the quality of her natural singing voice. Her vocals are produced to a mechanized quality on "Love You Like A Love Song" and she sounds like she is doing a solid Britney Spears impersonation on "Whiplash." While the vocals on "Who Says" sound occasionally syrupy, Gomez is able to show off some of her range on that track. "Dices" might be the most vocally impressive track of When The Sun Goes Down given that Gomez is not credited with translating "Who Says" to create "Dices;" Gomez performs the song with a precise and excited emotional quality of the English language version and many of the words come faster in "Dices," so that's no small feat.

When The Sun Goes Down is an album that tackles love, loss, and a lot of youth empowerment and it manages to hit more often than it misses on the lyrical front. In fact, "Who Says" has a lot of merit to it in the way it attempts to inspire the listener to change the world. When Gomez sings "Who says, who says you're not perfect? / Who says you're not worth it? / Who says you're the only one that's hurtin'" ("Who Says"), she is clearly exhorting the listener to challenge the authority of those who keep us in our places. The problem with "Who Says" on the lyrical front, though, it the way it includes so much emphasis on appearance over substance. It is hard to take seriously an empowerment song that repeats ". . . that's the price of beauty / Who says you're not pretty? / Who says you're not beautiful?" ("Who Says") so often, as if those were the most important qualities to validation.

What originally drew me to the works of Selena Gomez probably was the catchy quality of "Love You Like A Love Song." While "Love You Like A Love Song" seems vacuous and like a catchy hit at first blush, Selena Gomez & The Scene (and the trio who actually wrote the song) manage to make a pretty universally-accepted scholarly analysis musical: "It's been said and done / Every beautiful thought's been already sung / And I guess right now here's another one / So your melody will play on and on, with the best of 'em" ("Love You Like A Love Song"). The song might not be one of the great pop songs of all time, but it is solid and more substantive than most dance pop.

When The Sun Goes Down makes a solid stab at a song with conflict and angst on "My Dilemma," but it is undermined by its lines. With predictable rhymes like "And I know, what I know / And I know you're no good for me / Yeah I know, what I know / And I know it's not meant to be" ("My Dilemma"), Selena Gomez & The Scene present a song more generic than compelling.

Ultimately, When The Sun Goes Down is an average album that peaks early and the best parts are probably present on the band's compilation albums. The best song is "We Own The Night," the low point is the entirely forgettable "That's More Like It."

For other, former, Artist Of The Month works, please visit my reviews of:
The Collection - Alanis Morissette
American Fool - John Mellencamp
Goodbye Alice In Wonderland - Jewel

5/10

For other music reviews, please check out my Music Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2016 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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