Mixing her storytelling talents and real-life events with her angelic voice, Australian folk singer/songwriter Gracie Jean’s debut record “Romance is Bad” is coming out on the 16th of September 2022 and it’s the mellow sweet music journey you’ve been looking for.
“Romance is Bad” opens with the bright open sound of “I Don’t Wanna Sing The Blues Anymore”, where Gracie Jean shows her total control over her angelic voice as she smoothly steers the vocal melody along the music breathing life into every note. “Little Mountain Home” is an emotional heartfelt tune with dark vibes, especially at the verse, it progresses slowly and steadily slipping into some dreamy hopeful tunes and then softly swinging between both moods depending mainly on Gracie’s voice and lyrics. “Weight of The World” builds up on the dark emotional mood of its predecessor, determining that the bassline with the ambient background melody played a major role in maintaining the mood and framed the vocals pushing it to the very front. “My First Love” used the same formula replacing bass with escalating strings that helped make the sound bigger. The raw acoustic guitar, colorful slide guitar melody, smooth percussions, and laidback vocal melody of “Whatever Goes” produced an uplifting mood the record needed at this point. Building on the dreamy uplifting mood comes “Overcome” and “Forgettable” with floating melodies and open sound that transfers a lot of emotions projected by Gracie’s sweet vocal delivery, and the well-written and arranged guitars and piano conversation. The title track “Romance is Bad” and “Endings” ended the record on a high note taking us into a more alternative direction with some strong The Cranberries vibes that I believe fit Gracie’s sound and were a fresh change in the record’s semi-steady sound, I guess they needed to go higher into the middle of the record or its first half.
“Romance is Bad” is the best introduction to Gracie Jean’s vocal abilities and songwriting talent. It has a lot of beautiful fluid uninterrupted melodies, I believe that the record needed more dynamic sound and some hooks to keep things interesting, but Gracie’s voice managed to keep me hooked from the beginning till the very end. Good luck Gracie, looking forward to more, cheers!