Following the visually arresting video for Brooke Candy’s 2014 single “Opulence,” RCA Records reportedly pushed the L.A. rapper-singer in a more mainstream direction, resulting in a series of watered-down pop songs that clashed wildly with her eccentric personality. With the possible exception of 2016’s “Happy Days,” Candy seemingly struggled to reconcile her avant-garde instincts with her desire to deliver a message—in this case about mental health and substance abuse—to a wider audience.
Since parting ways with RCA in 2017, Candy has been free to let her freak flag fly, but her long-awaited debut studio album, Sexorcism, is disappointingly one-note. The daughter of a former executive at Hustler magazine, Candy has always been outspoken about her sexuality, and she expounds on the power of “pussy” on nearly every song here. “When I ride the D, I make it wet…Cum so hard, I wet the bed,” she raps over a spare trap beat on “XXXTC,” which all but wastes a feature from pop doyenne Charli XCX.
Candy has cited Madonna’s Erotica as an influence on tracks like “Rim,” a campy, formless tribute to analingus featuring RuPaul’s Drag Race alumni Aquaria and Violet Chachki. But Candy seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the enduring power behind the queen of pop’s 1992 opus. Unlike Sexorcism, the majority of Erotica isn’t about the physical act of sex, and even at its most explicit, both the pop craft and lyrical content of Madonna’s album are smartly layered. Candy’s lyrics, on the other hand, boast a simplistic notion of BDSM: “Tell me where it hurts and I’ll make it hurt better,” she proclaims on “FMU.”
When the album does stray from the topic of sex, as it does on “Freak Like Me,” Candy peddles boilerplate declarations of nonconformity—“I’m not America’s sweetheart, I’m more like Jeffrey Dahm[er]/Rather be hated for what I am than what I’m not”—in a polished pop package that likely would have pleased RCA. Only rarely does Sexorcism strike a balance between Candy’s rival inclinations: With its talk-box hook, opening track “Nymph” is both weird and catchy, while “FMU” is propelled by an infectious sample from Lords of Acid’s “I Sit on Acid.”
Another ’90s throwback, “Cum,” finds guest Iggy Azalea spitting deliciously stupid couplets like “Murder the pussy, then plead your case/Fuck me good, then feed me grapes.” Unfortunately, the rest of the album is bogged down by humorless assertions of sexual prowess set to repetitive, narcotic beats (the inclusion of last year’s “Oomph” would have provided a welcome change of pace). After nearly half a decade in record label purgatory, surely Candy has something more to say than “eat my ass.”
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