Kelly Clarkson’s skillful covers of Billie Eilish’s “Happier Than Ever” and Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees,” from last year’s Kellyoke EP, hinted at what it might sound like if the singer were to reprise the more rock-oriented sound of her under-appreciated 2007 album My December. Indeed, “Skip This Part,” the opening track from her 10th studio album, Chemistry, takes a page straight from Eilish’s song, with understated verses followed by a doo-wop-inflected hook and a climactic, guitar-driven coda in which Clarkson exorcises her angst: “I feel every break as I realize my fate/I succumb to the taste of betrayal/I try numbing the pain with my sweet mary jane/But I know this escape isn’t stable.”
For the most part, though, Chemistry relies on a familiar mix of elements from Clarkson’s two prior albums, the pop-centric Piece by Piece and the classic soul-inspired Meaning of Life. A loosely structured song cycle, the album documents the stages of Clarkson’s grief in the wake of her split from her husband, talent manager Brandon Blackstock, employing genre as a reflection of her mercurial emotional state. With her hand in the writing of a dozen of the 14 tracks here, it’s her most personal effort since My December, which also happened to be a breakup album.
With its gradually escalating beat and gospel-inflected backing vocals, “Me” represents Clarkson’s rediscovery of self, while the plucky guitars, stuttering synths, and driving kick drum of the effervescent “Favorite Kind of High” embody the chemical rush of new love. The album’s title track serves as a narrative volta, a relatively restrained love song underpinned by acoustic guitar and wistful vocals. Clarkson is still one of the best singers of her generation, displaying a combination of technical proficiency and looseness of feeling throughout.
“You were my Rock Hudson/It was real, but it wasn’t,” Clarkson sings on “Rock Hudson,” a loaded first line that signals her take-no-prisoners approach. She lobs one barbed lyric after the next throughout the song—“Could I ever compete with the bar you set so high that you could never even reach?”—and even makes a stinging reference to “Piece by Piece,” in which she’d juxtaposed Blackstock’s commitment to their family with her own father’s absence.
Songs like that and the ’80s-style power ballad “High Road” are marked by boilerplate pop-rock arrangements, prompting one to wonder what Clarkson could cook up with intrepid producers like Jack Antonoff and Ariel Rechtshaid. It’s not until the end of Chemistry that she experiments with some new ingredients, as on “Red Flag Collector,” with its spaghetti-western guitar, trumpets, and tack piano, and “I Hate Love,” featuring Steve Martin (who’s name-checked in the lyrics) on banjo. The tropical closing track, “That’s Right,” feels even more leftfield, a quirky but apt conclusion to an album that captures the fickle, out-of-body aftermath of heartbreak.
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How does this glowing review translate into a 3.5 star rating?
From the review: “The album’s title track serves as a narrative volta . . . .”
I looked in several dictionaries, and the word “volta” isn’t even listed. 😐 It seems that Mr. Cinquemani purposely hunts for the most obscure words on the planet to add “credibility” to his reviews. Usually this kind of thing is a crutch for poor writing. 😏 Good writers don’t have to put on airs like that.
I just wanted to say that I love Kelly Clarkson’s music with all my heart and I want to spend the rest of my life listening to it because her music is the best thing that has happened to me ever since she had been chosen as the first winner on season 1 on the T. V. show, “American Idol” and came into the music industry back in the year, 2002 (that is the year that I graduated high school). I would be lost if she ever decides to stop making music because making music is what she does best. I bought her, “Chemistry” album a few weeks ago at Target when it was released on June 23, 2023 and in my personal opinion, I think that it is one of the best pop albums that was released in 2023. I also have all of her previous albums (including her 2 Christmas albums) and I still enjoy listening to them as well. Kelly’s “Chemistry” album reminds me of her, “Piece By Piece” album and her, “Meaning Of Life” album because all of the songs on the album has some beautiful ballads on it with a touch of soulful sound to it, and she sings them so beautifully like always. A lot of her fans out there, such as myself would always buy into Kelly as a talented music artist and as a songwriter because not only that she can add a perfect mixture of country, pop, R&B, rock, and soul to her music, she can also make the lyrics to all of her songs very meaningful and not a lot of music artists in the music industry can really do that when it comes to their own music. I would rate her, “Chemistry” album as an A+ and her music never disappoints me at all. It’s so sad that she had to file for a divorce from her ex-husband, Brandon Blackstock because she is so humble and she is so down to earth when it comes to meeting her fans and when it comes to being interviwed, she deserves better. End of story.