Dave Schneider

Missed opportunities at literally every step. Demi Lovato is a talented artist, and she has written a number of excellent rock songs over the last decade and change that are buried in the synth-pop and electronic sounds of the times. This album, however, doesn’t commit to a creative approach in re-imagining the material, and it squanders so many of the conventions of the pop-punky sound she’s going for, many of which would have legitimately enchanted these re-imaginings of her own tracks. Take Give Your Heart a Break, for example. This is an excellent track, and I’ve always imagined it as a rock song. Some of the early execution on her ‘rock version’ shows promise, including the use of another vocalist to harmonize on verse 2. The bridge buildup crescendo seems to hit all the right notes, but it demands a stripped down chorus immediately afterwards with everything dropped out except the palm-muted guitar and vocal. When it hits the variant chorus, the track needs to build back up with high-hats on the 2s and 4s—and then culminate in a big blowoff chorus at the end. Instead, they just jump right back into playing the chorus, same as before, after the masterful bridge crescendo. It leaves the whole track feeling very anemic. Other songs just squander opportunities to explore new directions. Skyscraper could have taken a page out of Poison or INXS, doing some real self-indulgent work with solos and building the beat with climbing toms. Heart Attack is so heavily distorted that it just sounds like a bad Punk Goes Pop cover, which is content to call a male butt-rock vocal and extreme distortion a ‘re-imagined’ genre-bend. And then you have songs like Cool for the Summer, which are effectively unchanged. I hope this album doesn’t dissuade other artists, including Demi, from attempting this format again. The concept is very cool, especially with pop-punk and rock in general making a long-awaited return to mainstream music. But this was an unpleasant album from start to finish.