Back in 2014, singer-songwriter Jillian Rose Banks’s fusion of downcast synth-pop and R&B provided an antidote to sugar shock like Pharrell’s “Happy” and Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass.” Her affinity for flashy electronic flourishes and moody ambience persists on her third album, the aptly titled III, but it scans as artlessly straightforward by 2019’s standards, where genre-bending is increasingly commonplace and eccentric dark pop by the likes of Billie Eilish sits comfortably at the top of the charts. III does little to push Banks’s own limits, much less the precedents set by her alt-pop contemporaries.
With the aid of producers like Buddy Ross and Hudson Mohawke, Banks wields her most heavy-duty arsenal of sounds to date here. Crammed full of walloping bass, spacious drum fills, and an endless array of pitched vocal samples, the album’s sonic palette is grandiose, verging on excessive. The synth frequencies on tracks like “Gimme” and “Stroke” are so blistering they sound like they’re frying your speakers. There’s no denying the album’s imposing maximalism, but its bells and whistles feel like sensory overload, a red herring that distracts from Banks’s boilerplate commentary on toxic relationships and self-empowerment.
While the electronic pyrotechnics of the album’s first half border on cacophonous, the arrangements on the latter half are comparably toned down and smartly edited. On the standout “Hawaiian Mazes,” threads of cascading harp and piano interweave with pitched-down vocals, forming a serene latticework that brings to mind the music of Jhené Aiko. “Alaska” features the album’s most interesting beat: a syncopated back and forth between off-kilter piano and bongo drums. Throughout these final tracks, electronic touches support rather than overpower the acoustic instrumentation.
Likewise, Banks delivers the album’s strongest vocal performance on “If We Were Made of Water,” delving into her head voice over subdued piano, synths, and strings. Her reedy vocals are better suited for lighter textures like these, as opposed to the suffocating backing tracks of the album’s first half. Her voice grates on “Till Now,” while her attempt at rapping on “The Fall” is nearly unintelligible, her voice so hoarse it resembles a screech.
On album closer “What About Love,” Banks’s outlook on love is optimistic (“What about the life that we could make?/We could grow older”), a deviation from the heartache and hubris that are usually her subject matters of choice. Although they’re empowering in their own right, the anthemic “Gimme” and “Stroke” veer into braggadocious theatricality: “And even though you wanted me sweet, you could call me savory,” she boasts on the latter. When you peel away III’s performative edginess, it’s difficult to form an idea of who the real Banks is.
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