Troye Sivan’s debut album, Blue Neighbourhood, was released in 2015, so it’s likely to be one of the most recent albums I cover in the Lockdown Rediscovery series. Apart from anything, with albums more recent than that, I can’t really consider myself to have rediscovered them, because I never lost them in the first place.
Some albums, such as Demon Days (which I already wrote about) and Dark Side of the Moon (post forthcoming), are best when you listen to them in order. Blue Neighbourhood is not such an album. It’s a good album, with some great tracks, but in all honesty it’s a bit all over the place. An opening track should set the tone for an album; WILD does no such thing, and the transition into BITE is, frankly quite jarring. There’s no progression to speak of, and no story, beyond the individual stories within certain songs.
That said, I’ve not chosen this album because I want to rag on it or criticise the structure and order of the album. I’ve chosen it because I think there are some really great songs, and I’d like to write about them.
If we ignore its underperformance as an opening track, WILD is a great song. It’s fun, catchy, and the layering of sounds throughout creates a really great sound, and one which is pretty sophisticated and multifaceted, particularly compared to Sivan’s earlier EP, TRXYE. To me, it represents the majority of the album: it’s part of a cohesive unit with FOOLS, EASE, TALK ME DOWN, COOL, HEAVEN, YOUTH, SUBURBIA, and TOO GOOD. These tracks all have a pretty clean, mellow sound, and trace a nice progression of themes – like I say, they don’t quite manage to form a story, but they certainly serve as individual scenes.
It’s no coincidence, too, that these are the songs on the album that I enjoy most. Though there’s a good deal of variety within these songs, they feel unified and coherent, and the overall sound is great – pleasant melodies, and some great lyrics. COOL particularly stands out lyrically, at least when the lyrics are considered in conjunction with how they’re delivered. HEAVEN does a nice job of approaching the idea of authenticity.
And being me, I couldn’t help but love SUBURBIA: I’ve got a whole post coming (eventually) about suburbia (the concept, not the song) and I’ll be honest, this song helped me to codify a lot of those feelings. It’s nostalgic, mellow, melancholic, and really quite special in my mind. Lyrically, it also surpasses the rest of the album with its vignettes of family life and summer parties, and its gentle retrospectives about the things left behind. I have very mixed feelings about suburbia – indeed, mostly negative feelings – but the song is great.
In writing this post, I felt I ought to do my due diligence and listen again to the album as a whole a few times rather than just the songs I popped into a playlist when I first listened to it at its release. And I’m glad I did, because I somehow completely overlooked LOST BOY, which I think is actually one of the better songs on the record – it doesn’t supplant any of my favourites but it’s certainly top 50% for me.
Ultimately, I don’t think Blue Neighbourhood is as good as Bloom. Partly that’s because Bloom connects with me thematically in a much stronger way than Blue Neighbourhood can – though as I’ve alluded to, there are elements of the latter, particularly within SUBURBIA, which I relate to pretty strongly. But I’m glad I’ve revisited Blue Neighbourhood. It deserved more attention than I gave it at the time, and it’s a pretty remarkable debut album (though the antecedent of TRXYE makes it feel less like a debut in the purest sense) in terms of its relative stylistic diversity and overall quality. There are some misses, but they’re made up for by the hits.