“Do you even know what my love really means?” Jessy Lanza asks on the groovy “Midnight Ontario,” the second track on Love Hallucination. It’s a question raised throughout the Canadian singer and producer’s fourth studio album, a seemingly contradictory collection of energetic heartbreak anthems set to city pop-adjacent instrumentation. Lanza’s pre-programmed rhythms and knotty chord progressions remain as intricate as ever, but even if some of the songs have staying power, like the wonderfully daffy “Big Pink Rose,” the album’s songwriting is removed from the intensity of romance.
In short, there’s quite a bit of distance between the emotional objectives that Love Hallucination attempts to tackle—from jealousy on “Don’t Cry on My Pillow” and “I Hate Myself,” to self-acceptance on “Marathon”—and the end result. Specifically, it’s marked by a noncommittal mix of apathy and bewilderment, which generally comes off as ambiguity for its own sake.
That isn’t to suggest that Lanza might have been better served adopting a more didactic approach to music-making. In theory, there’s something admirable in how workmanlike the artist’s methodology can be, as she often pares down her lyrics until they become akin to nursery rhymes, but there just isn’t much meat on the bones here.
Even if there were a stronger sense of thematic cohesion or affective resonance to these songs, Lanza’s singing voice is, to be generous, limited. It gets the job done on tracks like “Drive,” where all that’s required is cooing the word “drive” 22 times, but on more meaningful songs, such as “Limbo” (on which she phonetically spells out the song’s five-letter title) and “Gossamer,” Lanza fails to convey the myriad feelings that she’s attempting to articulate.
Even with a surprisingly sturdy opener—the lusty “Don’t Leave Me Now” sounds like a whirlwind of breakbeats being let loose at the same time—Love Hallucination doesn’t feel like it ever properly gets underway. At nearly 38 minutes, the album stays around long enough to where its effervescent nature starts to serve as a hindrance rather than a strength, where the age-old idiom of “in one ear and out the other” begins to ring truer than ever before.
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