Lost and found love songs
Zolita follows up 2020’s full-length Evil Angel with an EP entitled Falling Out / Falling In. While it’s essentially a breakup record with a glimmer of hope towards the end, the name wants to draw attention to transitions between loves rather than the loves themselves, putting the fluctuating individual before the eternal couple.
Every song but the retro synthy “Ruin My Life” begins with some guitar figure—from the muted power chords of the opening track to the acoustic fingerpicking on “Drunk With Your Exes”—which gets quickly overtaken by rubbery bass lines, computerized drums and the reverb-laden background vocals that embellish Zolita’s more folk-caliber natural delivery and fill the gaps between the main melodies with throwaway “hoo ooh woo” melodies and such.
The obsession of the Out half of the album is communication. The “20 Questions” speaker has to know everything about her ex’s new relationship, in spite of wishing she could move on. Tonally, it’s the Swiftiest song on a very Swiftie record, quoting the “nice dress” line from “Wildest Dreams” and managing to sound both spirited and damaged as effervescent hooks go by. The narrative gives the ex a chance to reply, “I gave you my best and you just gave me questions.” By asking about her competitors all throughout the relationship, the speaker enacted a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s self-awareness listeners expect from an album that sets out to look at love from both sides.
“Drunk With Your Exes” complicates the theme. Now the partner is interrogated because she refuses to share her inner life, not because the questioner is insecure. In contrast to her disconcertingly playful performance on “20 Questions,” Zolita sounds explicitly pleading and frayed on this one.
Though lyrically and musically it sticks to hard-rocking country conventions, “Crazy Ex” might be the strongest track on the EP. One readymade surprise follows another as the classically descending “I know-ow-ow” pre-chorus, vaguely reminiscent of church organ music, drops into a chorus that lurches over ferocious guitar chords in a rhythm unprecedented by the earlier songs. The capper is so blatantly obvious from a songwriting standpoint that it feels almost daring. How to conclude a piece about being a crazy ex? Repeat, “I’m that crazy ex.” It simply works.
On the subject of surefire popcraft, there’s “Ashley,” which covers the Falling In half of the concept. It’s another entry in a long list of country love songs named after a woman and in a regrettably shorter list of country love songs named after a woman and sung from a woman’s perspective. Moon-June-spoon rhymes are supposed to be corny, but they’re ubiquitous because, when placed right, they really click. So what if “Ashley I need you so badly” is low hanging fruit? It’s heartfelt in this case, and there are enough quirks surrounding it to give it identity. For one, Ashley also rhymes with bad dream, which rhymes with happy. Furthermore, the hook to this song doesn’t have to do with that rhyme at all—it’s the three times Zolita yodels the word “die” in “I would die happy.” Finally, the song transmogrifies when a big crowd of background voices blooms at the end, going from an ode from one individual about another, to an unusual sort of rallying cry.
Zolita’s Falling In / Falling Out offers six love songs that are up to today’s pop-rock production values. They’re sincere, they get stuck in listeners’ heads for a little while, they contribute to the underserved genre of mainstream LGBTQ+ oriented music and their replay value lies in the personalizing details; similar to the three or four note guitar riff off in the distance of “For the Both of Us” that evokes the hesitation one has to be overcome in order to dish out tough love, or the line “I’d kill my career long as you’re right here,” which wouldn’t hit the same way if these were humble folk songs instead of fancy studio works.
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