Album Review: Skylar Grey- Don't Look Down

About two and a half years ago, one of the cast members of the variety radio show I co-host and produce brought in a song by Skylar Grey—the demo version of the hit she had written for Rihanna and Eminiem, “Love The Way You Lie.” In setting up the song before we played it on the show, he mentioned that Skylar Grey was the stage name of a young woman named Holly Brook.

Well wait just a minute there. Two years before that, I had seen Holly Brook open for Duncan Sheik at the Varsity Theatre in Minneapolis. She played a couple songs from her 2006 “girl with an acoustic guitar” album, and accompanied Lauren Pritchard on a few songs—Pritchard having gained notoriety being in the Sheik-penned musical Spring Awakening. Brook also played keyboards in Sheik’s band during his set.

(RIP holly brook)

So just who is Holly Brook? And for that matter, who is Skylar Grey? While they are, like, literally the same person, musically, they are polar opposites. While Brook’s debut record, released on a major label, didn’t gain a ton of mainstream attention—Grey is a pop song writing machine. Like she is just shitting these things out left and right.

Her proper debut as Skylar Grey, Don’t Look Down, is the kind of record that I really have no business listening to. It’s pop music in the sense that it is “music that gets played on Top 40 radio.” It’s pop music in the sense that it’s so fucking huge sounding—like every song on Don’t Look Down is just enormous with the heights it strives for. Gigantic sing-a-long choruses, ridiculously expensive sounding production value—this is pop music.

To me, Don’t Look Down isn’t a terrible record. I was just bored listening to it. Not bored to tears, like a Norah Jones kind of situation. But bored as in it was like, time was passing REALLY SLOWLY, and each song is really only 3 or 4 minutes. But at one point I thought like an hour had passed (it hadn’t) and I was still nowhere near the end of the album.

I don’t listen to the radio. I know that is weird for someone who still technically works in radio, and for someone who had to do an hour-long radio show, every weekday, for like 2.75 years. In the car, I just prefer to listen to CDs. The “hip” station in our area is an embarrassment to the ears, and then the rest is County, Christian Rock, or Pop/Top 40.

So like for sure, “Back From The Dead,” “Final Warning,” and “Religion,” are destined to be on the radio, to get overplayed, to invade your ears and get stuck in your head, and to pretty much be everywhere. The Eminem co-signed “C’mon Let Me Ride,” finds Marshal Mathers dipping back into his silly voice territory, copping lines from “Bicycle Race” by Queen.

The fatal flaw in Don’t Look Down is that it just entirely too many pop songs at once. Not every song is destined to be a hit—like every album by any pop sensation, there are singles, and then there’s filler to get you to the next single. Grey/Brook tries earnestly though on each song to make them all feel important and not just phoned in. But about midway through the album, it starts to get weighed down by its own excess and extravagance.

It’s tough to say where this album, and where Holly Brook and/or Skylar Grey will fall into the pop landscape, and how it’ll all be remembered over time. By my estimate, in its first week, it seems to be selling well—it was holding at number 8 on the iTunes Top Album Chart a week after release, but now has fallen to number 25—right behind the soundtrack to a Disney movie called Teen Beach Movie, and right before Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. So she’s in good company.

Mysteriously enough, this record has been either finished and was sitting someplace collecting dust for two years, or it required a lot of work and created a lot of delays. Under the name Invinsible, it was supposed to have been released in 2011. The first single, “C’mon Let Me Ride,” dropped in Decmeber of last year, featuring a relatively sexed up looking Brook/Gray, standing in a puddle of mud, holding onto a mountain bike.

(straight thuggin)

In fact, Gray’s image has been rather suggestive/sexual within promotion for the record—the album’s cover has her in her alltogethers, leaning on a washer and dryer, presumably waiting for the rest of her clothes to finish up? When I added this album to my Google Play Music library, the stock image of her that appeared was of her straight thugging it in a bikini top and a hat cocked to the side. This is all a long way from the girl in the baggy white stocking cap I saw strumming an acoustic guitar four years ago, and an even longer way from the fresh-faced young lady gracing the cover of Like Blood, Like Honey, eight years ago.

Skylar Grey- "Love The Way You Lie (original version)"

In the limited amount of research I do for writing these pieces, I came across an interesting quote from Brook/Grey, w/r/t “Love The Way You Lie.” She said she was inspirited to write the lyrics based off of what she considered to be an “abusive relationship” with the music industry. For a song that was billed as, and took on the meaning of, being about domestic violence, I guess I was a little surprised at the cavalier use of a metaphor like that—your shitty experiences in the biz are a little different from a woman getting smacked around by a man.

Don’t Look Down is an enormous and arrogant “debut” record for Grey. It’s tough to surmise if Holly Brook will continue to be Skylar Grey, and if either of them will achieve the so desired mainstream success they are both chasing.

Don't Look Down is available now via Interscope Records.