Olivia Rodrigo

• Sour [Geffen, 2021] A
• Guts [Geffen, 2023] A

Consumer Guide Reviews:

Sour [Geffen, 2021]
This manifestly competent 18-year-old actress has a two-boyfriend romantic history dating back to 2018 that pop aesthetes who avoid the Disney channel can just Google--both, unsurprisingly, with actors a year or two older than she is. Also unsurprisingly, she's gorgeous. But that's never stopped women from worrying that their bodies aren't "perfect," which along with other inevitable insecurities was enough to fuel an exquisite teen-breakup concept album produced by 38-year-old helper bunny Daniel Nigro. Again and again dainty melodies meet big drums and are only stronger for it as every simple word comes clear. She doesn't drink yet but knows how he likes his coffee and let's bet her own; she says "fuck" and "bullshit," the latter to modify "eternal love." Though he did the driving let's also bet he gave her some of the lessons that flowered into her first megahit even if she still can't really, in everybody's favorite trope, parallel park. But when he transfers his attentions to "someone more exciting," it's Olivia's jokes he's telling, Olivia's Billy Joel he's playing. And for a transcendent finale she leaves her own pain behind and sends her very best to an abused boy she knew when they were small and a middle school friend with parents who "hated who she loved." A

Guts [Geffen, 2023]
An aesthetic triumph that deepens its psychological complexity with diverting jokes by establishing that love comes even harder to 20-year-old pop phenoms than to less extraordinary humans, or do I just mean extraordinary females? Either way, only someone as gifted, famous, and likable as Rodrigo has much chance of launching lovequests as worthy of your attention as these. Seldom if ever have the romantic tribulations of a young superstarlet been laid out in such credible detail, their defining complication the extreme unlikelihood that she'll meet anyone as smart, decent, successful, and hilarious as she is on the party circuit her well-earned fame opens up to her and sticks her with. With special respect for the perfect double entendre "Get Him Back!" and the well-schooled rhyme "Dazzling starlet/Bardot incarnate," I hereby swear that these 12 catchy, hyperintelligent, self-penned songs should be committed to memory by any up-and-coming entertainer ready to admit that it may be the better part of discretion to love someone who is in some crucial respect an equal from another sphere--an up-and-coming climate scientist, say. Showbiz hopefuls however gifted are too likely to succumb to jealousy just because she's so damn good at what she does. A