Album Review: Title by Meghan Trainor

"All About That Bass" spread throughout the globe with the speed of a pandemic disease, and its viral nature neatly camouflaged how Meghan Trainor was no naïve ingénue. She landed a publishing deal at the age of 18 and had one of her songs recorded by pop-country superstars Rascal Flatts, show-biz bona fides that belied her Internet sensation status. Title, Trainor's full-length debut, suggests this tactic was deliberate: snag an audience via a near-novelty, then rely on her well-honed craft for the rest of the record.

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There’s a lot to like and to question on Meghan “All About That Bass” Trainor’s debut album, sung like 21st-century R&B, but imagined in the milk bars of the early 60s, where the Shirelles reigned supreme. The message is self-respect, but it’s the kind dressed in pastels: Dear Future Husband suggests Trainor isn’t the sort of feminist who’s going to single parent by choice after a lucky dip at the sperm bank. The success of Lips Are Movin’ confirms that she’s no Eamon-style one-hit wonder; but Trainor might do well to study Duffy’s fate.

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Meghan Trainor rose to power on a hit that promised just one thing: Bass. No treble would do for a girl who wanted, more than anything, to celebrate women’s big behinds. Now, it seems Trainor has chosen just as narrow a focus for “Title,” her major-label debut. It obsesses over a sound that ruled the charts three decades before she was born.

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Meghan Trainor helped make booty big in 2014 with her body-positive smash "All About That Bass." While the 21-year-old singer rocks more sass and self-empowerment on her full-length major-label debut (which, confusingly, shares a name with the four-song EP she released in September), she's also charmingly old-fashioned. Doo-wop is Trainor's thing, from the girl-group bounce of "Dear Future Husband" to the finger-snapping balladry of "Like I'm Gonna Lose You," where John Legend plays Marvin to her Tammi. To her credit, Trainor – whose torch-y, tangy vocals can suggest a scrubbed-up Amy Winehouse – co-wrote every tune.

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Meghan Trainor's omnipresent 2014 smash “All About That Bass” has been accused of pitting women against women and perpetuating the idea that one's self-worth should be measured by what boys like. And while it's true that the song peddles a brand of faux empowerment, commodifying a body-positive message and selling it to young white girls, the biggest sin of Trainor's ingratiating earworm is that it's the aural equivalent of high fructose corn syrup. Trainor's follow-up, “Lips Are Movin',” strictly adheres to the same beat sheet as its predecessor (doo-wop throwback, girl-group harmonies, bubblegum-pop hooks), but it at least eschews the gimmicky self-help metaphors.

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Meghan Trainor might be all about that bass, but she isn’t all about consistency quite yet. This major-label debut, billed as her first album after Sony effectively eviscerated all traces of her three prior independent releases, cranks out saccharine doo-wop ditties and poppy hip-hop. Trainor sticks to the kinds of flourishes heard on her breakout single All About That Bass: finger-clicks, tight three-part harmonies and stabs of (programmed) horns.

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Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” was a breath of fresh air, as long as you didn’t think too hard about it. Dropped into a competitive Top 40 battleground trying its best to figure out how to incorporate dubstep and EDM, a body-positive call to arms wrapped up in girl-group duds with a hip-hop sheen stood out if only by sheer chutzpah alone. That Trainor’s attitudes were as judgmental and dismissive as the ones that she was embraced for as an antidote to (albeit aimed in a novel direction) was immaterial.

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Meghan Trainor breezes past troubles on "Title," the debut album that follows her 2014 smash "All About That Bass," which spent eight weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Hot 100. Last month it also earned Grammy nominations for record and song of the year. A cheeky doo-wop throwback that starts out with the singer admitting she "ain't no size 2," "All About That Bass" wooed fans by the millions with its old-fashioned sound — a welcome standout on dance-dominated Top 40 radio — and its ostensibly self-affirming message.

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Here you'll find reviews of four much-discussed albums released in January that, forsomereason or another, we couldn't get to in time. Natalie PrassNatalie Prass Natalie Prass (or, your fool, as she mostly refers to herself on her stunning debut) is a Nashville-based singer-songwriter. She began her career as a back-up singer for Jenny Lewis. Spacebomb’s Matthew E.

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