All Too Familiar Electro Pop

Sound of a Woman, the debut album from Canadian electro-popper Kiesza, sits at a categorical fork in the road; within it two genres vie for attention, though neither leaves a strong enough mark to make Woman distinctly its own. There is the hollowed-out EDM echo that supports nearly every song on the record, and then there are the fronting dance-pop loops that blend obsessively into one another like a sugar-sweet Mobius strip. To the unacclimated ear Sound of a Woman may seem rambling, however to the well versed the album presents itself as something far more tiresome; an unwarranted experiment in how many ways Kiesza and her producers can try to reshape the catchiness of the artist’s European hit, “Hideaway.”

Sound of a Woman boasts little strength; lyrically it is dry, musically it leeches off of the inventiveness of its predecessors, and in total it sounds like the extended soundtrack to a Samsung advert. The record seems to be a product of laziness and apathetic drive, as if Kiesza made Woman only to hold the bragging rights flaunted by recording artists. “Hideaway”, the album’s first and most well known track, which went platinum in four European countries while scraping off only minor recognition in the States, drives the composition of the following twelve songs by unabashedly serving as structural template for its album-mates.

The tracks themselves are walls of straightforward, pounding thumps overlaid with Kiezsa’s well-worn habit of working much too hard at being ‘poppy.’ Most recognizable is her eagerness to create hooks by looping confused caws and howls together; while it works for one or two songs, one could find more lyrical diversity in Kiss’ discography.  There really is not much to critique about the album, as there is not much substance to analyze. At its roots Sound of a Woman is stripped of honesty and all too evident of professional mimicry, suffocating itself in its own disinterest.