Avril Lavigne’s new album is an incongruous mess. The album opens with her current single “Rock and Roll,” which proves to be the antithesis of its title. The song’s opening salvo “Let em know we’re still rock and roll,” is drenched with digital effects and, paradoxically, those effects underscore how the song is anything but.
Lavigne continues the posturing in her first single: “Here’s to Never Growing Up.” In it she suggests that she is singing Radiohead with her friends. Rather problematically, she also notes that, along with her friends, they “live like rock stars and dance in every bar.” Naturally my suspicion is Lavigne and her very friends actually confused Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night” with “Fake Plastic Trees.”
Just to prove she’s not only a rocker, but also an artist on the avant-garde, Lavigne takes a break from all the posturing for some “experimentation” on the track “Hello Kitty.” The pseudo-dubstep cum rocker features Lavigne intermittently breaking into Japanese. If at this point you have found yourself wondering whether or not this author is recounting his most recent LSD trip, or writing a review of an album, I wouldn’t blame you.
One last thing: the album also features a ballad with Lavigne’s heartthrob husband Chad Kroeger (of the best band of all time, Nickelback). But I will spare you the details.
