I’m rooting for Rick Astley. If you’ve been paying attention to him lately, you should be too. This album is somehow both so boring and so wild.
You’ve been on the internet, I am already getting bored midway through this sentence at just alluding to what we all know Rick Astley best for. Though Rick does plenty well for himself in embracing this strange facet of his fame which ancient meme-culture has handed him, his last decade has been a demonstration and a half as to what he is, and what he can still bring to our lil ears. His 2016 comeback album 50 made this immediately apparent within its literal first ten seconds; Rick full-gospel belts out his first line to Keep Singing with every point about what he’s capable of getting proven in the same amount of time.
More recent has been his two much-loved Glastonbury 2023 sets, an antidote to the aloof and disdainful frontman-audience relationship which is souring on some: Rick is unashamed of letting his role be simply, the guy on stage there to give everyone as good a time as he can. This is great, and on Are We There Yet this seems like our thesis point. The core of the album is good-times, feel-good, remember-things-you-like. In a strangely damning manner, it’s a throwback 70s/80s album, to the point where many tracks feel distractingly like they’ve existed maybe once or twice before already.
Our opener Dippin My Feet is a foot-tapping Memphis Soul-inspired track. Not so much in the sense of feeling inspired by the genre as a whole though, but just one very specific Memphis-Soul track: Take Me to the River by Al Green. The pace, choruses and, well, the lyrics about placing oneself into waterways are so similar it’s hard to not find it distracting. It’s far from plagiarism, in a singular piece of art that’s typically taking one person’s ideas and claiming it as your own. It’s synthesis, because it also integrates a lot of other cues from how Talking Heads covered Take Me to the River too? Wild.
It’s not just 70s and 80s throwbacks we’re getting, because we also get Close (Your Shoes) which is not the foot-fetishist anthem you’d expect from that title, but is that kind of indescribable 2010s plodding-anthem thing that happened for a while, which only Jeremy Renner is expected to still be making these days. A more bizarre moment is the refrain in Never Gonna Stop, which leaves just a few small questions: Why has Rick Astley written another song where the chorus repeatedly states things he’s “Never gonna” do? Is this somehow meant to in any way be a commentary on that other track? Did he just forget about the song he made which overshadows his whole life? Is Rick metafictioning us? This song is a genuinely great gospel track and is a standout in this album so far, allowing Rick to flex what he does best, and I will never be able to enjoy that about this track, because I will only ever have these questions.
Even stranger on this bizarre, plainly-competent, derivative, feel-good album is what happens in the last four tracks: these tracks are just so, so incredible out of nowhere. And its insanity after sitting through what came before, it’s true whiplash. The core showiness of what preceded it is still there, but in Maria Love we get a profoundly incredible execution of a gospel-pop anthem. It’s a little Tom Jones-y, and the invocations and familiarities don’t feel like they’re bogging these tracks down now. They are suddenly, their own thing.
Rick gets a little kinky with us (just a little) on Take Me Back to Your Place, with some of the tightest-sounding production we’ve heard since the last track. Lots of brass, strings, and backing vocals colour this track, and yet none of this stops the track feeling laidddd-back. Waterfall is so nice as well, moving back more to a more trad-gospel pace and feel. It would probably be a plenty good piece on its own even if it stuck to far more plain chord choices, but we get some real spice chucked in here, especially in the chorus.
We close on piano ballad Blue Sky, which does what a piano ballad should do right. It’s moving in its very plain lyrical account, and gives off gloom, it gives off hope in that gloom. Though the backing vocals do overwhelm a touch near the end, Rick sounds as great as ever. It’s genuinely like a couple rewrites down the line from being a Leonard Cohen classic. What the fuck was this album?
Are We There Yet? is in fairly plain sheep-clothing. Within that sheep-clothing, was one of the more confusing-looking wolves you’ve ever seen, like not quite incomprehensible to human eyes, but you need to have a glass of water or two after looking at that strange wolf.
The four track EP which just seems to exist at the end of this album is like an 8 or so, but wow on the whole, this was a 5/10. I guess? Who knows anymore. You’ve turned yourself into a pickle, Rick.