album review: 'love sux' by avril lavigne

I think there’s a conversation to be had about how we let certain artists and genres age.

Because it’s not remotely consistent - hell, in some genres sounding older is often an asset and can ensure you have a career for decades longer than your peers, like blues and soul and country and folk. Other genres just give you the runway and if you can sustain an audience nobody will mind, which is where you’ll find a lot of rock and metal and R&B and rap - even punk in certain quarters. But when it comes to pop-related genres, with the constant desire to sound fresh and new and with content embracing all sorts of melodrama more often associated with teenagers, especially with the brash rebellion of pop punk… age suddenly becomes a factor, and you see critiques like ‘oh come on, they should have grown out of this by now’.

But I’m not sure I agree with them to the same extent anymore, or at the very least it should be on a case-by-case basis. For one, the assumption of ‘youth’ in pop has always been a misnomer, not just because of the older acts producing and writing a lot of it, but with certain sounds being nostalgic and cyclical coming back in; it would feel weird to tell someone who inspired a sound not to come back to it just because they’re older, especially if the music works and there’s an audience for it! Secondly, there often is an audience for it - just because we all got older doesn’t mean there aren’t folks with nostalgia for their reckless days of youth, it’s not like pop culture has been building several franchises for decades to multiple generations of it! Hell for millennials in particular it seems particularly disingenuous to deny our generation job progression and further steps forward in adulthood and then attempt to shame folks for clinging onto pop punk we liked as teenagers! Thirdly… are we going to ignore the entire past decade of acts in the 2010s underground who took an older, more textured view of pop punk, that proved you could take an older eye to the genre, often times building off what those in the 2000s laid down?

And then there’s Avril Lavigne herself, and I’ll say it: I think a lot of folks have been monumentally unfair to this woman, and at points I include myself in that. Keep in mind her first two albums dropped before she was twenty - she’s only a year older than Carly Rae Jepsen for crying out loud - to a music industry that was all the more enabled to be exploitative and with a listening audience ready to not just ignore it, but to be far nastier in the dismissals and undue mockery; there’s a whole lot of 2000s music writing that has aged very badly and I’ll leave it there. So of course she got branded a sellout cowriting with - sigh - Dr. Luke for The Best Damn Thing at the age of 23… and then what tends to get overlooked is that she tried for multiple albums to get more ‘mature’ on Goodbye Lullaby and Head Above Water and it didn’t really translate to her strengths, because it’s not her fault her entire genre and popular scene imploded as she reached her mid-20s! So when you pair it with more label shifts than many folks realize - she’s now on Elektra and cosigned with Travis Barker and that seems like a natural win here - and now coming into 2022 with the style of pop punk that made her famous now back in the zeitgeist with many of the new generation calling her a major influence, I’m not begrudging her this chance to get the spotlight back, even if it comes with Mod Sun cowrites and collabs with blackbear and Machine Gun Kelly - as well as a song with Mark Hoppus, co-frontman of Blink-182, and it’s very interesting how the male acts don’t seem to get this volume or timbre of criticism, despite being a solid decade older! But at the end of the day, it ultimately comes down to the music - does Avril Lavigne’s return to pop punk live up to any expectations?

Well, yes and no - let me get this out of the way now, even if nostalgia is a factor and I can say I enjoyed this more consistently than Avril Lavigne album since The Best Damn Thing, it’s an album that has me thinking that it should also be better. And for the most part, it has a lot less to do with Lavigne herself and more with the producers and architects driving this genre’s comeback… mostly because with the sharp contrast of Lavigne’s early work to this, it exposes how it falls short. Not that this album is bad - again, maybe it’s nostalgia talking but I generally think this is pretty decent… but it’s also not Let Go or Under My Skin and given just how familiar I am with that material, I can pinpoint exactly why Love Sux isn’t as good as it should be.

And really, it begins and ends with Travis Barker’s production - he’s got credits on about two thirds of the album in comparison with MOD SUN and industry veteran John Feldmann, and it’s the tracks from Barker that expose this problem. And that problem is compression: yeah, the guitars are loud and brash and Barker might be one of the best in the industry integrating modern trap touches with his live kit, and he can stack the hooks for days and make sure they pop - the pianos spraying off the noisier riffs and massive drums on the title track, . But when you realize that the bass is chronically underserved to drive those grooves, or the buzzy layers oversaturate the mix - ‘Cannonball’ and ‘F.U’ are really rough in that regard - or just how piercing Lavigne’s vocals can sound in the mix, or how the drum timbres themselves can feel underpowered or clipping the mix as they struggle for air and that’s not even getting into the fake handclaps, you realize Barker is just importing the same problems he gave to jxdn and WILLOW and even Machine Gun Kelly and they’re all the more glaring, especially when you have such an easy comparison. If we’re being brutally honest, neither Let Go nor Under My Skin have great production - The Matrix were good at what they did, but it wasn’t exceptional because it didn’t need to be, more workmanlike than anything else - but at least those albums understood how to balance the bass and place Lavigne’s powerhouse vocals in a place where they could breathe, there was a sense of dynamics! And when Barker steps away from production for the ballads like ‘Avalanche’ and ‘Dare To Love Me’ with more strings and piano, the contrast is glaring - I’m not saying Feldmann is delivering top notch production here, but it sounds more consistently competent, and when you factor in a really breezy runtime clocking just over a half hour, it has me wondering how much of Barker’s involvement is mercenary, to nab a swathe of credits and cash in on nostalgia rather than deliver a more refined album, especially when she’s on his boutique label.

But that said, I’ve heard Barker’s formula fail artists before, and there’s a part of me that thinks Barker himself might be getting short-changed in his approach - it’s not like his kit sounds consistently good here, especially his cymbals and kickdrum. It might be that he realized very early on that his biggest asset - and indeed the reason to check out this album for any reason - is Avril Lavigne herself, who quite frankly blows the majority of folks in the scene right now out of the water. She’s always had a huge voice with a ton of bratty personality, and while that’s been tempered with age - ‘Bite Me’ is a great example - in terms of sheer belting firepower there’s very few who can compete. Now this is absolutely a double-edged sword - even if she can cut through an oversaturated mix with ease, voices this huge are hard to produce well, the overcompression makes certain frequencies incredibly shrill, and you can easily tell whenever they’ve slightly lowered her volume to make Machine Gun Kelly, blackbear, or Mark Hoppus even sound like they can be in the same room, and even then, blackbear on ‘Love It When You Hate Me’ is just blown off the stage. MGK on ‘Bois Lie’ and Mark Hoppus on ‘All I Wanted’ both fare better because they have some vocal texture to add weight to their pickups - and unlike a lot of folks I’ve never hated MGK’s singing even if it’s technically rough - but it’s very obvious Lavigne is the star of the show, and she came ready to deliver. It’s certainly never boring, and that places it above a fair chunk of her catalog!

But what about the lyrics, where if I’ve seen the majority of criticism it’s come here, where folks are calling them dumb and immature and adolescent and melodramatic, not something a woman in her mid-30s should be writing. And here’s the thing: I agree with a lot of the assessments - it sounds very high school, it’s over-the-top and melodramatic and it references spin the bottle and tic-tac-toe and none of this is overflowing with a lot of dignity, a lot of the same assessments I made of Tickets To My Downfall… and that’s why it works so well! I’ve already gone off about how the age argument is a lot of bullshit with regards to Avril Lavigne in a similar way it was for Liz Phair nearly twenty years ago, and I could add that it’s very telling just how much of a double standard is applied when a lot of stereotypically masculine writing can come straight from the penis and never receive an inch of criticism for “maturity”, or hell, I could highlight how a considerable majority of people in general get older but never ‘grow up’, but let’s ask another question: in terms of what these songs actually are, how far do they go into that territory? Because with the majority of them being bombastic breakup songs, the back and forth of bad relationships for bad reasons that passion overrules, or a righteous kissoff when they implode for lack of communication, the exasperation of being done with love and the hesitation in wanting to be loved again when it’s real, these are themes can be damn near universal, it’s only genre convention and framing that declares them as immature… which paradoxically, given how well Avril Lavigne can still sell them as if she was still a teenager, becomes part of their power! Hell, you could argue that given how self-assured, self-aware, and in control of her scene Avril Lavigne is, you can argue that returning to this stylism and delivering reflects even more composure, which becomes a balancing act she’s been nailing for twenty years. That being said, I do have criticisms of the writing, in that it can feel a little generic - Lavigne’s writing has always painted in broad strokes for popular appeal, but a little more flair and detail could have helped these songs pop off the page a little stronger.

But at the end of the day, it’s hard for me to deny this album does exactly what it sets out to do and has a lot of fun getting there in a streamlined package. I wouldn’t put it alongside her best or even call it great - the production holds it back and I’m not sure the best songs have the sheer spark of magic that made them so potent twenty years ago - but even outside of nostalgia I think this’ll work for both the kids who recognize the influence and the adults who eventually came back around and realized Avril Lavigne deserved better than what she often got. It’s not revolutionary in pop punk, and maybe some of this is me just being able to meet this where it is - kind of why I still defend Tickets To My Downfall - but I still think this is good, and Avril Lavigne being back properly is a net positive; I’ll take that win.