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School Boy · Interscope | genius.com
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This effervescent sophomore effort completes Carly's transition from one-hit wonder to indie darling
And this is crazy /
But here’s my number /
So call me, maybe”
The biggest hit of 2012 smashed through speakers like a bull through a china shop. Ribboned in silken strings and garnished with a girlish lilt, this song was simply inescapable. I for one was subjected to a sample of it nigh every morning, muffled by the wall separating my bedroom from my sister’s.
Thank Christ the fad of custom phone alarms has subsided. Thank Christ also for the intervening years; embittered though I was towards 'Call Me Maybe' at the time, I can now listen to it with fresh ears.
And what I hear is nothing short of remarkable.
The first half of the chorus devotes itself entirely to self-effacement, and the second is capped with a verbal backspace: a pang of regret after taking the plunge, an exclamation buckling into a question.
On the concisely-titled Kiss, Carly completely skipped the music industry’s litmus test, which by all measures she should have failed — she lacks the ironclad confidence required of even the most minor stars. But it seems that catapulting immediately from a bronze place on Canadian Idol to one-hit-wonderdom obviates many a prerequisite, for the world chose her modest constellation to string up through the heavens.
And on her second studio album, Carly proves that she is just as tangled in anxieties as the rest of us: brown eyes peering out from beneath a dark fringe, striped wool drawn over chewed nails. The title suggests some neon headlining statement, but the music itself unfolds in subtle shades.
She sings of could haves and never weres, of intentions and promises, of befores and afters and betweens. But Carly never allows herself to indulge in the moment: she slinks around the edges, skirting towards the buildup and the comedown, lingering in some twilit liminal space of breathless potential.
Carly follows the tug of her emotions, riding the momentum up and down in waves that swell and crest but never break. And each contour she peppers with tiny sparkles of inspiration, little moments that make you tilt your head and say, ‘oh, neat!’ That omnipresent string section threaded through ‘Call Me Maybe’ was no fluke. Carly’s whole debut album shone with tasteful accessories, from the crystalline pulse of the title track to the colossal zippering synths of ‘Tonight I’m Getting Over You.’ And Emotion continues on the same stylish trajectory.
‘When I Needed You’ boasts a cracker of a bassline, vulcanised rubber stretching and squiggling and trailing glitter like parkour in heelies. Elsewhere, an implosion of empty space accompanies a circular refrain — “Fall into me / Gimme love, gimme love, gimme love”— that shifts gears with each repetition, from earnest request to sanguine seduction to proud demand. She even finds the time to critique the consumption central to her newfound celebrity lifestyle, albeit with a characteristic sideways spin: “There’s a little black hole in my silver cup / So you pour and I’ll say stop, stop.”
Even the lead single, delightfully titled ‘I Really Really Really Really Really Really Like You,’ buries a genuinely novel compliment in the featherlight comedown from a helium-high chorus: “Who gave you eyes like that / Said you could keep them?”
I could spend a whole paragraph on the fakeout of ‘Boy Problems,’ so I will. The title suggests a fairly boilerplate lamentation, but those titular problems are not the protagonist’s; they are the problems of an exhausting friend who takes up so much emotional real estate that Carly has none left for herself: “I think I broke up with my boyfriend today / And I don’t really care.” By the end, she establishes not only healthy boundaries, but also the first charting platonic breakup jam.
Each of Carly’s three studio albums — chronologically Kiss, Emotion, and Dedicated — raises a question — to what cause is she dedicated, what emotion is she feeling, whom does she want to kiss — and instead of answering it directly, colours in the space around. It’s no coincidence that these three words are each fairly anodyne. By drawing the boundaries wide she gives herself far more room to work with, compared to, say, a declarative Born This Way or a kintsugi Lemonade.
And while it’s true that Carly’s albums lack such narrative throughlines, the tradeoff is that they don’t finish so much as stop. A complete meal leaves you nourished and satisfied, while a succession of irresistible burst-in-the-mouth delicacies just leaves you wanting more. Until it doesn’t, of course, which is why the sugar rush is best experienced as little shining jewels shuffled into a party mix, rather than as a buffet of candied entrées and iced desserts.
Lemonade is designed to be drunk down in a single sitting. Carly’s confection keeps you coming back.
“When I’m close to you /
We blend into /
My favourite colour /
I’m bright baby blue /
Falling into you /
Falling for each other”
The proper British spelling is a flex. Carly’s an oddball, to be sure, but an oddball gifted with preposessing modesty and a flair for melodrama; an oddball whose laser-sharp instincts have yet to steer her wrong. She has managed to parlay a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity into a whole career bringing bubbles and sparkles and effervescent joy into the world. And I, for one, feel much like she did circa 2012:
“Before you came into my life /
I missed you so bad”