Kicking My Feet & Screaming
Ruel · Pop / R&B
“You called it Kicking My Feet & Screaming, but the loudest thing on the whole record is the silence where a risk should be.”
Ruel, you named your third album Kicking My Feet & Screaming, a sequel to Kicking My Feet, which means your big artistic statement at this point is a tantrum with a track listing. Ten songs about the full arc of a relationship, the highs and the lows, falling in and out of love, delivered in that velvet voice that has been carrying you since you were a teenager. The voice is real. The vision is a mood board. You stacked the credits with Julian Bunetta, John Ryan, Kenny Beats and Dan Wilson, the kind of room that has written hits for everyone, and that is exactly the problem. When the writing room is that decorated and the result still sounds this smooth and this safe, it is fair to ask what is actually yours. The emotional honesty you keep promising arrives sanded down to a pleasant glow, the audio equivalent of a candle that just says feelings on the label. There is a great record hiding in here, because the talent is not in question, only the nerve. You keep gesturing at the lows of a relationship without ever letting the music sound low. A breakup is messy. This is immaculate. The two should not be that far apart.
When Ruel stops performing maturity and simply sings, the talent is undeniable, that voice could sell a phone book, and a couple of these tracks land with real ache. The raw material for a great album is sitting right there in plain sight.
A sequel album with nothing new to say
“Kicking My Feet & Screaming is explicitly framed as a follow up to Kicking My Feet, recycling the title and the same concept of cataloguing a relationship's highs and lows.”
The fix Earn the sequel. If you are revisiting the same emotional territory, show what you learned the second time around, do not just re shoot the same feeling in slightly nicer light.
Co written into a corner
“The credits feature an all star cast including Julian Bunetta, John Ryan, Kenny Beats, M-Phazes and Dan Wilson across just ten tracks.”
The fix Strip one song down to just you and a single collaborator and let it be a little ugly. The polish is currently hiding the person underneath it.
Comfortable where it should be brave
“The album is pitched as an authentic exploration of emotional highs and lows, yet the production stays uniformly smooth and radio safe from front to back.”
The fix Let the lows actually sound low. A breakup record that never once sounds uncomfortable is a breakup record nobody quite believes.
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