Asa – Beautiful Imperfection review

Asa’s new album, Beautiful Imperfection, bounces around from genre to genre, creating 12 songs that all sound distinctive, but rarely reach dig deeper than the surface. Every song sounds pleasant enough, coasting along to plucky guitars, pianos, and Asa’s smooth voice, but none of these songs have an edge that would make them truly engaging.

Beautiful Imperfection is filled mostly with songs about love and the troubles that come with it, but there’s no pain or self-reflection behind Asa’s musings about these difficulties, leaving a song like “Be My Man”, a song about a woman who can’t leave a man who starts to “act the fool” sound particularly naïve and shallow. If the song wasn’t so upbeat and cheery, lyrics like, “Can we stay up all night / we can argue, we can even start a fight / and say I love the way you smile and everything will be just fine” might seem like an apt analysis of a damaging relationship that the narrator is trapped in—instead, Asa seems to be glorying it.

When Asa deals with the political or the philosophical, such as on the album’s final track, “Questions”, she does so with lyrics that sound like something read at a high school poetry contest. “How do people get so busy they don’t find time to love? / What’s the truth behind why people go to war?” aren’t deep or incisive questions, they’re lazy, overly general attempts at appealing to middlebrow Americans.

Things fare better on tracks like “Oré” or “Broda olé” where Asa’s lyrical content doesn’t get in the way of the music and you can just appreciate it for what it is.

Despite my negativity, none of the album is bad—it makes for a good hour of easy listening—but don’t expect to find any music that will change how you think or feel. If you can reorient your expectations and close your eyes, Asa can effectively transport you to a nearby Starbucks where life is easy and you can ponder why exactly do people go to war.