Like to the damask rose you see, or like the blossom on a Now 55 CD
My breakups are always a fun little roulette wheel to decide which random artist’s songs get to be on constant rotation, to bear the brunt of my very deep and complex and cool emotions, until the healing has finished. After my most recent a few months back, No Doubt and, furthermore, Gwen Stefani landed that job. Did you know she was the lead singer in that band? Would be really embarrassing if someone only made that connection really, really recently right?
So, to find out that her upcoming release would be a breakup album, I rode out the rest of my Hollaback Girl-soundtracked turmoil knowing just the thing for me was round the corner! Right Gwen? Right? Right? Right Gwen? Right?
Starting off Bouquet we get Somebody Else’s, a mildly worrying start. Passable soft rock passably passes along for the runtime of the track, and it’s just so incredibly adequate. Nothing feels particularly broken, nothing feels at risk. Undeniably, Gwen’s voice burns as intensely as ever, it’s probably difficult to stop her even if they tried, but the inexpressive and safe surroundings of the song she’s contained in stifles what she feels able to do. Let’s keep listening then.
Hitting title track Bouquet we don’t find much more excitement, we instead find ourselves thinking “Hey, isn’t there an early 2000s pop track that the chorus melody is exactly reminding me of?” (The answer is yes, you were thinking of World of Our Own by Westlife, of course. Always looking out for you). The slow drums and guitar washes throughout feel so lifted wholesale from the 2000s that the instrumental could have been scraped out of McFly’s B-Sides album. Is it a throwback? Not so much, just a tread on far too over-walked ground, relying on long-term memory degradation to come back in season.
OK, so flowers. Love. These two things, have you ever noticed that in some ways, they might be kind of similar? One of the greater risks people fall into in writing is bringing in over-used similes and metaphors: retreading clichés is the quickest way to drop your audience into boredom. Even quicker than suddenly breaking into a lecture about literary device best-practice.
So, what is new to be said when comparing love to flowers? Maybe there’s something out there, but is there enough fuel there to find something half-decent for ten tracks in a row? If this upfront choice is generously framed as a risk, it is the only one taken in the writing of this album. While the scars of Stefani’s relationships are no secret here, anything specific to bite on is far too generalised, far too blurred.
Trundling on, we pass through Marigolds and Late to Bloom, about as listenably upbeat as we get throughout the project, without running the risk of excitement.
Closing out is Purple Irises, a duet ballad between Stefani and new husband Blake Shelton. Main things to note here is that Gwen Stefani seems to allude to the fact she doesn’t age with the lyrics “It’s not 1999, but this face is still mine”, a possible confirmation of her vampirism. Also, the bridge makes mention twice to “leaving lovestains”. So uh, you draw your own conclusion on what that’s meant to be about, and I’ll draw mine.
Btw mine is that they were talking about cum.
You’d be forgiven to assume this was a country album from that big old stetson Gwen has had placed on her in the cover, it’s hardly even that beyond a fair bit of cowboy chords. What it is, is safe and bubble-wrapped. One final kick in the teeth for this project: What You Waiting For? autoplayed as soon as the album finished.
So what is this album? Not a whole lot, but certainly a 3/10.