Beabadoobee - 'Fake It Flowers' REVIEW

On Beabadoobee’s long awaited debut album, she straddles the two stand out styles of her career thus far, acoustic-y bedroom pop, and ‘bubble-grunge’ a phrase coined to describe her soft but still grungey, early 2000’s reminiscent sound. 

She manages to use both sides of her songwriting excellently, with ‘Care’, ‘Worth It’ and ‘Yoshimi, Forest, Magdalene’ showcasing her heavier tendencies well, with Pavement influences clear across these songs, along with Beach Fossils and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. 

The slacker rock of the 90’s and early 2000’s is a candle she seems determined to reignite, and as a young british woman in 2020, is the genre’s saving grace, bringing it to a new fresh audience.

Contrastingly, ‘How Was Your Day’, ‘Back to Mars’, and ‘Emo Song’ show her more vulnerable, quieter, sedated qualities, with acoustic guitar and shimmering synth lines taking the place of distorted guitar and loud drums. This is where she started and it’s clearly a style she is comfortable in and has a lot of skill as a songwriter in this area. The songs are full of hooks and implant themselves within the listener, eager to be listened to again.

Fake it Flowers showcasing both bubble-grunge, lo-fi bedroom pop and everything in between is sure to have it appeal to a massive audience, however some songs can occasionally lack depth, and more heavy leaning listeners may turn their noses at the earnest lyrics and heart on sleeve fashion of songwriting.

Ultimately Fake it Flowers is a labour of love, fantastically demonstrating Bea’s evolution and career so far, and I am very excited to hear what she will release next.

- Josh Palmer

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