Review: Lindsay Ell, heart theory

Melodic, beautifully produced, and hooky as hell, the aptly named heart theory is a stunner by any metric. But calling Calgary singer/songwriter and guitarist Lindsay Ell’s second album “country” is a stretch, more of an arbitrary decision than a helpful musical marker. This, friends, is a pop record.

But it’s a very good pop record, filled to bursting with everything that makes pop music, well, pop: songs so sparkling they may have been wiped down with lemon juice, obscenely memorable choruses, relatable themes and Ell’s gorgeous, boundless voice which is both engine and showpiece.

Love in all its horror and splendour is the name of the game for the most part. Indeed, Ell admits in her bio that “the tracks take the listener along the path of the seven stages of grief. ‘If my last record was called The Project,’ she writes, ‘this one could be called the process.’”

What a process! Buoyant album opener “Hits me” sets the tone, juxtaposing downcast post-breakup lyrics against a glittering, pristine aural curtain. No peanut shells or beer stains here. “wrong girl” and “gO to” cleverly survey two sides of the same coin. In the former, Ell rallies forcefully against being a booty call. While the banjo-boosted latter (a fleeting wink at the hayseed nation) finds our girl saucily suggesting that she wants to be more than a mere “vodka soda on a Friday night.”

The sole detour from the break-up/make-up/make-out roadmap is the ballad “make you” which chronicles childhood sexual assault so candidly it should come with a trigger warning. But if further proof was needed that Ell is a songwriter of greater depth than meets the ears at first blush, this is it.

Heart Theory is released August 14, 2020.
Listen to it here.