‘Smitten’ by Pale Waves
If romantic love was easy, there wouldn’t be so much art on the subject. Especially with art in the form of popular music, and the fourth Pale Waves album, Smitten, flows smoothly and assuredly toward the form and the subject.
That assurance comes largely from frontwoman Heather Baron-Gracie, whose unashamedly girlish voice adds discovery, innocence, and fresh hurt to reminiscences of an apparently abundant romantic history, an incredibly active imagination, or both.
And while the Manchester, England quartet will tour the UK as a band this October, the other three members are fully present only once on Smitten with “Not a Love Song,” a decidedly seductive pop-rock spell within which Baron-Gracie plays Gothic witch.
Almost everywhere else, Baron-Gracie collaborates with fellow Pale Waves guitarist Hugo Silvani and even more with Simon Oscroft, a New Zealand native who’s played, composed, engineered, and produced for and with pop groups like the Aces and OneRepublic (and also film-score favorite Hans Zimmer).
Compared to Zakk Cervini’s contributions to the last Pale Waves album, 2022’s Unwritten, Oscroft’s and Silvani’s are more overtly polished: for example, on “Glasgow,” Oscroft handles all non-vocal elements as if balancing the band’s local forebears, like the Smiths, and contemporary rather than trendy pop artistes of our time, like Taylor Swift.
Baron-Gracie responds with aplomb, soaring and wafting like late Cranberries lead singer Dolores O’Riordan in the drifting jangle of “Perfume,” falling slowly into the Swiftian midtempo pop-rock of “Imagination,” or going for the crossover jugular with the bright and shallowly lusty “Kiss Me Again.”
The depth resides in the lyrics, where Baron-Gracie embraces queerness with ardor. That she can so casually blend her sexuality into the mainstream-pleasing listenability of Smitten proves that to be queer is, to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, more than a kind of sex. It is a kind of love.
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