Consumer Guide Album

Billie Eilish: When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? [Darkroom/Interscope, 2019]
Slotting this self-created 17-year-old as pop computes musically and commercially while reminding us how amorphous that once snappy term has become. Her soprano too diminutive for vocal calisthenics, her sensibility too impressionistic to bother mapping out track-and-hook bliss points, Eilish is a home-schooled Highland Park weirdo whose darkly playful version of teen-goth angst had already captivated millions of young weirdos-in-potentia before this electro-saturated debut album put in its bid for the rest of us. Seldom catchy in any conventional sense, every one of these 14 tracks entices the ear anyway, from "Bad Guy"'s "duh"s to "Xanny"'s blown speaker cone to the shuddering sound-pit that swallows "You Should See Me in a Crown" to the plinked piano of "All the Good Girls Go to Hell" to the tunefully cooed "Wish You Were Gay," and it keeps going. Only then it closes shut when one of the least self-glorifying suicide songs ever sets up a finale comprising songs titled simply "I Love You" and "Goodbye"--each quiet, each pretty, each what it says, each sad without ever turning gruesome or crossing its fingers. A