Ryn Weaver
The Fool
MAD LOVE/INTERSCOPE
6/10
Within the first few moments of Ryn Weaver’s debut LP The Fool, she quickly establishes her vocal calling card. It’s a ululating trill, a vocal embellishment that will quickly get stuck in your head—for better or worse. Either way, it’s a flashy quirk that makes her stand out in the madding crowd of “edgy” pop contemporaries, and its presence is unavoidable.
Not that her music needs the dramatic edge. Every song on The Fool is a grand finale: each sweeping epic is packed with thumping drums and booming vocals. She’s taken the love-it-or-hate-it formula that made her smash hit “OctaHate” so irresistible and capitalized on it to craft eleven songs that flow into each other so well that it’s difficult to tell them apart. Constant feelings of déjà vu aside, The Fool is a florid romp that can be enjoyed without the full-on guilty pleasure aftertaste left by Weaver’s sickly sweet peers.
