Overrated: Every Song on Robyn's "Robyn" Except "Be Mine!"

Konichiwa, bitches!

I first heard that Swedish pop singer Robyn, who scored a couple forgettable hits in the U.S. with "Do You Know (What It Takes)" and "Show Me Love" in the late '90s, was still alive in 2005, when Stylus Magazine (R.I.P., homeboys) praised the hell out of her new disc. They named "Robyn", which was apparently a huge hit in Sweden, the fourth best album of 2005, unthinkably (to me) pushing it above "Illinois" and "I Am a Bird Now". They also put the album's lead single, "Be Mine!", at #4 on that year's singles list, and basically called it a perfect pop song. When I read these year-end lists, Stylus had already exposed me to the beautiful pop tendencies of Annie and Hello Saferide, so needless to say I was anxious to hear an album like this, which they so clearly loved. So I looked for it online, and dammit, I couldn't find the thing anywhere.

So I waited and waited, and kept searching for the album. Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, and after a while I resigned myself to never finding the album and stopped searching for it. Then, by some genius stroke of luck a few weeks ago, I found it, and eagerly downloaded it. I was really, really excited for this thing. When it finally landed in my iTunes, I listened to the whole thing straight through, starting, of course, with "Be Mine!".

And after weeks of dealing with "Robyn", I've realized that Stylus got it half-right: "Be Mine!" is an absolutely fantastic song, arguably one of the best of the decade. The rest of "Robyn", though, sucks.

Well, SUCKS is a harsh word, and the album certainly is not terrible. Maybe it just sounds a lot worse to me because I built it up so high in my mind, especially after hearing "Be Mine!" But there's nothing here that connects to me. A lot of the tracks are examples of faceless glitch-pop, with uninspired arrangements and simple lyrics. Also, the personality Robyn establishes on the album -- girl in control! victim of love problems! -- is just tired and downright annoying at points. Half-decent songs like "Bum Like You" never fully develop and repeat their choruses until they're driven into the ground. Other tracks such as "Who's That Girl", which Stylus' Jessica Popper praised as "one of the best electro-pop singles I've heard recently", simply fail at everything they try to accomplish. The chorus is trash, the synths are distracting, and the line "Good girls are pretty, like all the time/ I'm just pretty, some of the time" reeks of a concept that hasn't panned out. "Good girls are happy, and satisfied/ I won't stop asking, until I die." Yeah, Robyn, you're unique, you're freaking amazing, you kick ass, we get it.

But that's what most of "Robyn" is: telling us, and not showing us. Witness "Konichiwa Bitches", which is basically a list of ways Robyn is fucking better than you. She will take you on if you rumble in her jungle; if you mess with her on the North Pole she will ice you, son; saw you in half like a magician, as well as count you out like a mathematician (...?); she's even more sweeter than a cherry bomb (...???); and finally, you have nothing on her, because, alas, you knows you a bum. This song sucks, and delves into creepy David Banner territory with the line "Cummin in your mouth, make you say 'yum, yum!'" Like "Konichiwa Bitches", most of the other songs on the album are just musically boring. It's as if Robyn dodged a trip to the Synth Store and instead rummaged through Kylie Minogue's garbage, pillaging from her rejected beats. Ideas are half-complete, and the structure of each song is so similar that it's difficult for one to stick with you. I don't know, maybe I'm just not hearing something that Stylus did, but Robyn feels like a caricature, and "Robyn" feels rushed. I mean, it's got "Cobrastyle" on it! It can't be that amazing.

But fuck it, if I saw "Robyn" in a record store (and apparently it'll be available in the States soon), I'd probably buy it, just to own "Be Mine!" on some sort of disc besides the multiple mix CDs I've made for myself and others. This song will blow you away. I've tried listening to other contemporary, and personally beloved, girl-pop songs like Annie's "Heartbeat" and The Pipette's "Pull Shapes" and I keep coming to the conclusion that "Be Mine!" is ten times better than them. Every time I hear Robyn declare "It's a good thing tears never show in the pouring rain" over those racing strings as the curtain goes up and the song begins, my heart skips a beat. The song is pure sugar.

What's remarkable about "Be Mine!" from a contextual perspective is that it basically achieves what every other song on "Robyn" fails to. Robyn is still the strong-willed heroine from the rest of the disc, but the song's admitted vulnerability adds a different shade to her two-dimensional persona. The voice is quivering, not assured, and we realize that Robyn actually is human. Jesus, Robyn really wants the guy she's singing about. The lyrics are very direct and all the more powerful because of it. "You looked happy, and that's great... I just miss you, that's all," she says, wide-eyed and full of regret in a spoken-word bridge. And compared to the dance-mongering blips of the rest of the album, the strings on "Be Mine!" sound urgent and indispensable. Building as the song progresses, they cut deepest into you at the chorus, then spiral back down. The chorus doesn't disappoint, either: it may be the song's most simplistic section lyrically, but the line "But you never were, and you never will, be mine" is the song's emotional climax, and the refrain is vital rather than stiff.

So I can disagree with Stylus' overall analysis of the album, but I can't disparage them, because I never would have discovered "Be Mine!" without them. Maybe I'll never understand what they saw in "Robyn", but I give them huge props for giving me another piece of pop magnificence.