Troye Sivan - Animal - Single [Review]

 

With the recent release of actor and musician Troye Sivan's new song "Animal," five songs (exactly half of the standard album) have now been released and heard from his upcoming (due to be released on August 31, 2018) sophomore effort, Bloom. (I miss the days when only one single, maybe two, would be released prior to an album's release. Albums nowadays are spoiled by too much being released too soon.) "Animal" is set to close the standard release (featuring only ten tracks) of the album, and Sivan has reportedly referred to it as '80s-esque, which I can definitely hear, as it does very much sound like an '80s ballad begging to be slow-danced to at a high school prom. (Even the single cover, pictured above, seems like a photo that might have been taken during the '80s.) The song takes an unexpected turn a little more than halfway through, however, when instead of sounding like an '80s pop ballad, it suddenly (albeit briefly) sounds more like a psychedelic Beatles song. At this point of the song, Sivan sings, "All is right in the meadow when I'm lying next to my fellow; baby, that's you...," and while I do not mean to sound too harsh, these are embarrassingly bad lyrics that sound like a love-stricken seventh grader attempting poetry. (I said something similar about "My My My!" when I reviewed that here.) "Animal," which is lyrically about primal attraction to one's lover, sounds like it will probably make an appropriate closing track on the album, which I am looking forward to hearing but at the same time am looking forward to cautiously. The songs that have been released from the album so far - "My My My!"," "The Good Side," "Bloom," "Dance to This," and now "Animal" - have been hit or miss for me, and I have really only been especially excited about "The Good Side" and "Bloom" thus far. My expectation is that Bloom will be substandard in comparison to the indie brilliance of Sivan's freshman debut, Blue Neighbourhood (which I reviewed here), but I suppose that I shall find out exactly two weeks from today when the album is released in its entirety.