Jennie: Ruby

SCORE: 30/100

It's never a good sign when the album gives you a headache before it's even over.

The more R&B leaning opening sound of Jennie's 'Ruby' is highly expected, but pleasant enough to make this start off as an enjoyable output for fans of K-Pop. It feels incredibly well-suited to the genre which leads to it feeling like a slightly uninspiring body of work from an overall standpoint, but it's much better than some of the competition that Jennie is up against. Her creativity is there, but she's doing too much of it rather than sticking into territories that she suits. When she is leaning the most into R&B this album is good, near great at best - and when she's trying the more trap-orientated sounds that have become increasingly common in the K-Pop sphere, she becomes much less enjoyable. There are areas where she clearly excels as well as ones where she does not, and this album showcases both sides of her. 

And if she had stuck with a more straight-laced approach at pleasant, soft R&B, we might've gotten a better overall output.

This album does fall victim to some of the worst stereotypical sounds of the genre, something that immediately had my expectations down low. Despite the calm, R&B focused opening that paves the way for a soft and enjoyable album, the first "actual" track of the album is almost obnoxiously loud - and it feels almost like a move of cloneage on the style coined earlier by Lisa. There's a huge amount of inconsistency in the sound of the album that makes this almost surprising to listen to due to just how all over the place it really ends up being - but some of it is palatable enough to be passable. 

K-Pop has been so disturbingly Westernized, especially in recent times, and songs like 'like JENNIE' and 'with the IE' are the exact kind of reasons why the entire genre gets such a bad rep. Jennie is a decent enough rapper, but the issue comes from surface-level and sometimes cringeworthy lyrical content as well as bad beats being incredibly and increasingly common with every "big" K-Pop release in recent times, and this album is no exception; it's more of an example.

This album tries to make something massive, and it instead feels like a spectacle that lacks too much in substance to be a feasible experience. The lyrics are the exact kind of thing you would unfortunately come to expect from a project like this - and the vocals and production are the only things that really save this album from being too lyrically dumbed down to be enjoyable.

There are some moments that give light to the album and it certainly isn't all bad, it feels so well catered to hardcore fans of the genre it's almost impossible to be mad at the album - but it isn't palatable enough from a more generalized standpoint. There are some solid moments that lie mostly within the producorial elements, the production is actually very good for a modern pop/K-Pop album, but it's far too messy overall to feel cohesive at all. This album suffers so beyond words horribly from its writing that it makes the entire album harder and harder to get through as it progresses, and by 'Damn Right', the album is such a pain to be listening to that it feels like an hours-long endeavor you can't get out of. 

The lyrical content (if you can even call it content a lot of the time) of this album is so messy it all feels almost nonsensical. Nothing here comes together sonically, none of the songs are sequenced in a way that makes sense for the album's runtime whatsoever - and some of the lyrics are so genuinely laughable it's hard to listen to this album without cringing.

It feels as if Jennie didn't know where she wanted to go or be just yet - and this album feels like such a surface-level example of K-Pop that it remains something without many standouts, if any at all. There aren't many tracks that stick as well as they surely could, and the wishy washy sound of this album is so similar to what happened on Lisa's album it's almost striking. If you're looking for an album that is constantly a gamble on hit or misses, this is the one for you.