Grace Carter still amazes with a great voice and lyrics but delivers a song that sounds like a thousand other songs
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Until now, Grace Carter has managed to avoid the more mainstream pop sound, favouring powerful vocals and a mellowed heartbreak vibe. Her songs have often felt they come for a place of pain, and ‘Amnesia’ is no different, being about the pain and hurt we force ourselves to forget in the hope it will help save the relationship. However, despite this reoccurring theme, she varies things up with a steady background beat and a bouncy chorus, which, while refreshing, sadly leaves the song feeling generic.
Carter’s lyrical prowess doesn’t fail to impress, writing from a place of maturity that helps elevate the song. She imbues an infrequent use of rhyme which lends itself to the beat and helps create a sense that the lyrics belong within the melody of the piece. Alongside lyrics, her vocals are still as impressive as ever, and there’s something toxically soothing about listening to her sing. The cracks in vocals and changing volume of voice help weave a sense of varying emotional states throughout the song, and the song has an undeniably repeatable quality that could leave you listening to it on repeat for hours one end.
However, it just doesn’t feel like a Grace Carter song. It’s not abhorrently different, but the accompaniment starves the song from true heights of emotion and leaves Carter’s voice sounding more like a side note. It lacks a sense of a moving melody that songs like ‘Wicked Game’ and ‘Why Her Not Me’ and fails to capture the equilibrium between the punchy beat and lyrical pain in songs like ‘Heal Me’. You don’t come away feeling influenced or changed, and the song lacks the ability to really impress you. It fails to send you into the emotional disparity that other songs have left me feeling – and that’s a shame.
‘Amnesia’ isn’t a bad song by any means; it’s just NOT an amazing Grace Carter song.
Grace Carter’s ‘Amnesia’ is out now via Polydor Records.
