Lenka's "Two": Double the Turd in One Album

Lenka is a new artist to me, but apparently not, as her work has been featured as the music in commercials I have seen. She is from the land down under and is known there for being an actress as well. "Two" is the fitting title for her second album, but maybe one was enough. My song by song notes are below, my album overview is: it's an attempt at a pleasant turd, but poop it, don't ingest.

"Two": Clever for high school lyrics: "two is the one!" Fun flow of music and rhyming lyrics, though close to being too bubbly for its own good. When she screams "Whoa" after the second delivery of the chorus it feels like a sound effect recorded separately and lazily cut into the track, adding to the plastic feel of the song. Cute song, though.

"Heart Skips A Beat": Little heart beats, a lot of claps, and generic soft pop sounds, mostly sweet in the ears, but nothing standout in terms of: would I go buy this song? No. Well done, but done been done, hope she is not another pop singer who sells things based off of quirky spin doctored personality and tabloid fame.

"Roll With The Punches": Females singing pop music to horns and the up and down bounce of piano type of music has become a popular sub-genre it seems. This song is a roll along up tempo piece that sounds purposely engineered to sound muffled the higher you turn up the volume, maybe this is a sad side effect to listening to music via the Internet instead of a clear master of a track, but something off on this song to me, not as good in the ears as the previous candy, making it even more forgettable.

"Sad Song": "ah ah ah wooo ooooooo oooooooo," album filler is a bad thing, but all too often it seems there is even song filler with ooos and ahhhs and whoas. After the opening of "woooooo" and the same old up and down piano formula for the song, my mind only heard the "wooooo" instead of the words for the rest of the boring ole track.

"Everything As Once": The lyrics to this seem better tuned for the pages of a children's book, describing traits and assigning them to animals and things and then breaking that up with a chorus stating "I want to be everything at once." "As warm as the sun, as silly as fun, as cool as a tree, as scary as the sea, " get it? Stupid. Sorry, but this is for preschoolers.

"Blinded By Love": I was eagerly waiting for a ballad to see if Lenka had the chops to carry emotion beyond all of the jingle jangle monotonous stuff. This song made me think she should try a country music album, which is me saying something positive of her voice and thinking her in an arena against Taylor Swift makes sense. The rhyme scheme is still fairly juvenile and I can't really get into it thinking about a 33 year old woman expressing herself creatively or trying to express emotion in this manner.

"Here To Stay": More soft ballad stuff, but once again, the way she rhymes things together, simple works, but just not for me here, lacks the power to evoke any true emotion from the piece and feels more like a girl scribbling bad poetry in her journal; becomes a ramble of blah, blah, blah to me, sing-songy, blah, blah, blah.

"You Will Be Mine": A pop music boy meets girl story with Lenka's soft delivery, her voice sounds the equivalent of being photoshopped sometimes, whatever I mean by that, I'm not a technically inclined musical listener, and I don't mean autotune robot-like. Lenka doesn't ever really go for it, or let loose, or belt anything out, which is possibly all well and good for her range, but robotic all the same.

"Shock Me Into Love": "oh oh oh oh, oh oh ohh," more of the same glossed over soft pop that is not going to make Lenka anything better than the television commercial soundbite that her success has been thus far.

"Everything's Okay": From the glossy soft oop and back to the piano "dunt dunt" add the claps. You can imagine people listening to this and walking down the road by squatting and rising over and over again. All in line and more boring than it sounds after seeing it for a bit.

"The End Of The World": She will be at the end of the world to celebrate the things you used to do like living life and breathing air and making rhymes that make no one care about your music. The only way to really embrace Lenka's music feels like to accept it as cute, but it's not good enough to get by on that, maybe a couple of tracks, but after that it's not even sugar that rots, just turd, push turds out and away, don't take them in.