Sad13 - Haunted Painting Review
this is a seriously cohesive project for a sophomore album and I cannot wait to see how she’ll top this down the line.
Sad13 is at it again. And by “it” I mean making crunchy and moody pop music that resonates in its much-needed niche. What Sad13 brings to the sonic equation bears serious promise, just as it did with 2016’s debut Slugger. But Haunted Painting builds on that established quality with exceptional tact, bringing in a variety of powerful tracks each underpinned with stunning instrumentation and engaging vocals.
Atmospherically speaking, the album starts strong with aptly named ‘Into the Catacombs’ creeping up on you as a suitably dreary introduction to the album. With its slow guitar and the haunting choral effect of its vocal components, this track establishes an intense and sombre atmosphere to lure you in. The tone is set and with such a strong precedent set, Dupuis forges ahead. It’s short and sweet, pivoting all-too-soon to ‘WTD?’, the album’s energetic lead single.
‘WTD?’ makes for some excellent light guitar pop, despite the contemplation and seriousness behind its lyrics. I’ve found myself whistling that opening guitar line consistently since Haunted Painting’s release, with the track lodging itself in some primordial chunk of my brain. That core “What is the drama?” hook is similarly catchy, permeating the entire track throughout. Where many poppy tunes in a similar vein would end on a climactic final moment before coming to an end, ‘WTD?’ retains the tone established by the album’s introductory track and grinds to a halt slowly with the spacious and crunchy culmination of its instrumental.
The space offered by the prior track’s closing moment grants welcome breathing room for ’Hysterical’, a banger making a welcome addition to the track list. It works on its own merits as much as it works as a culmination of that crunchy and danceable style that gave this album’s precursor its strength. The slower moments, pensive and sombre in their inflection, go perfectly with the space granted concurrently. However, I can’t help but feel that certain moments of ‘Hysterical’ are burdened by overproduction, with percussive elements around the minute-and-a-half mark that leave me questioning their usefulness, even if the bulk of the track remains seriously enjoyable in spite of this. Even now, I still question the necessity of these inclusions, even if they’re overshadowed by the quality in which they find themselves sandwiched.
“Chasing the ghost of a good time”, as an opening line, exemplifies the tonal strengths of the album. Keeping the asymmetry of theme and sound going with an upbeat and sweet soundscape, ’Ghost (of a Good Time)’ is a quirky, repetitive, tune with enough underlying instrumentation that it doesn’t feel too sparsely produced. Rather, the instrumentation serves to bolster the track. The guitar screech around the two-minute mark is also a nice wakeup call to anybody getting bored, which works well given the break from the song’s established formula that the next minute brings. There’s a crunchy quality to the main instrumental throughout, even when the rhythm mutates, which definitely accentuates this track’s already evident quality. The shaky vocal is a good inclusion, too, giving the song a bounce that it would otherwise lack. When the track takes its aforementioned detour around that two-minute point, it grows stronger for the breathing room offered here and stays strong until it sticks the landing into ‘Oops…!’. Its successor is more stripped back, creating a powerful sound out of some simple components. If it were on a more tonally happy album then this would be complete sonic comfort food. But this is a Sad13 album so expect something with a little more of a kick from the end product. Those wonderfully crunchy guitars stick around, as do Dupuis’ excellent vocals which suit the track satisfyingly. As the third single from the album it does feel flatter than its companions but its closing minute, sombre and expectably spooky, really makes up for any worries of the track’s impotence.
‘Good Grief’ sneaks in unlike any other track, even different in execution from ‘Into The Catacombs’, before leading into some heartfelt rumination. Punctuated throughout with a good percussive kick of the drums and a newer style of guitar instrumentation relative to the predecessor tracks, this is a great track for its sheer intimacy and its presentation. All dressed up with a heightened pulse of guitar in the midsection that makes way for the lower-pitched groans which lead us out, ‘Good Grief’ may very well sit the throne as my favourite from the album, despite its lack of catchy stick-in-your-head elements in the vein of ‘WTD?’ or ‘Ghost’.
Following that, ’Ruby Wand’ brings its own eclectic freshness to the album. Its mixture of guitar, vocals, and synth works well and Dupuis’ decision to bring such a spacious and expansive guitar into the mix pays off. The cacophonous effect before the track’s closing moments is another welcome crash of energy and what follows, a fizzling outro, is ample breathing room before ‘With Baby’ follows up with its own distinct vibe. That distinct vibe kicks off immediately with some escalating keyboard, some escalating guitar, and then suddenly by ten seconds in the track is moving full steam ahead. Recycling those three core components would supplant the track as great on their own merits but the slight off-kilter feeling brought on by the elevated chorus and the transient feeling offered by the bridge really highlight the strength of such variation on an otherwise tonally consistent project.
‘The Crow’ fizzles in, initially sounding grungier than others on the album, and it maintains a moody and subdued instrumental reminiscent of some of the angsty indie rock greats. Keep a keen ear out for the lyrics too, which are similarly edgy when they like. The buildup of drums at the onset of the track’s final quarter has a good groove to it before it flatlines into stripped-back vocals that lead us out. Another excellent tactical decision to give some breathing room to an upcoming track, the wholesome and swooping ‘Take Care’.
This penultimate track brings its own energy, reminiscent of that spacious track at the forefront of the album. There’s a chamber pop quality to this track, which swoops in with an elevated strings section. Dupuis’ vocals have an especially vibrant effect here, bringing out the best of what could have otherwise been a mediocre second-to-last. The whole track feels like breathing room after an album primarily comprised of crunchy indie pop rock, making for another clever inclusion to lift the album from a pit of homogeneity. It’s also, put simply, just sweet to listen to, being gentle, melodic, and soft in comparison to so many harsher sounds that preempted it. Album closer ‘Market Hotel’ is fine, don’t get me wrong, but at this stage one can’t help feeling that everything on show here has been done better at some point earlier on the album. This just means that these closing moments aren’t as memorable as they could be. But as an album that sticks the landing nine times out of ten, or in this case ten times out of eleven, I’m not about to allow ‘Market Hotel’ to leave an ugly taste in my mouth just because I didn’t enjoy it as much as its contemporaries. Dupuis should be really proud of what she’s created here, even with its faults and the occasional underwhelm; this is a seriously cohesive project for a sophomore album and I cannot wait to see how she’ll top this down the line.
