Machaela Sullivan - "Don't Think About It"

[StevePulaski]

Don't Think About It - EP (2015)
By: Machaela Sullivan

Rating: ★★★

Even just by watching her early acoustic covers of songs and variations of her original pieces on Youtube, one can tell that Machaela Sullivan wants to be the go-to artist on any girls' playlist. She has an effervescent voice that speaks to the demographic of the population going through their own struggles with relationships, life, and personal identity, and bears a sound that echoes the tender beauty of Carrie Underwood and the assertiveness of Megan Trainor.

Both of these personalities work in conjunction with another to create Sullivan's debut EP Don't Think About It, a tried and true pop country collection that takes her and her acoustic covers, which could easily get lost in the shuffle, and puts her several notches above her competitors. The crystal-clear production, recorded at Yackland Studio in Nashville, Tennessee, and flawless mixing make the release's subpremium asking price rather questionable; I have a feeling people wouldn't mind paying full-price for this release. This isn't your average SoundCloud release that comes with a pricetag.

Sullivan kicks off the EP with "Let's Paint a Picture," a song that really emphasizes the aforementioned principles of Underwood's music. She details a starry night with another person in the opening before kicking up the instrumentation on the chorus, as pop country songs often do. This song would be incredibly forgettable if Sullivan wasn't so intent on detailing emotions and setting, as she does specifically in the second verse, illustrating motions and gestures with another person that are slow to start but unstoppable once they begin.

Sullivan then turns nostalgic on "If I Could Go Back," illustrating tranquil moments on the playground where she'd "catch a few more chances and throw caution to the wind," in one of many lines that really show she's a talented songwriter. However, this isn't a tune pandering to the conventionality of nostalgia, but instead, a song that turns subtly regretful, even sad, as Sullivan recalls the past by saying "I would lose a few more battles so we could win the war." This is the kind of reversal I come to expect with pop country songs, songs that already evoke a more mawkish tendency and can fall into the generic category so easily.

"Walk Away," the followup track, plays like the female empowerment version of Cole Swindell's recent hit "Ain't Worth the Whiskey," as Sullivan details a woman who has clearly been hurt or let down by a man one too many times and giving her the vote of confidence that next time he'll come around, she'll just walk away. "Walk Away" really seems to be the kind of song Sullivan excels at making; the kind that hits with the right amount of visual detail and moxy and the perfect song young girls can sing into their hairbrush on sleepless nights.

Sullivan's debut EP ends with the titular track, a song that has her giving way to the impulsive side most all of us have. While it plays just a bit too much like "If I Could Go Back" in its instrumentation, the true talent of the song comes in the way Sullivan structures her verses to build off one another by separating sentences with line breaks and pauses, Yet, the interchangeable effect really comes through here because the song doesn't have the fallback of strong visualizations or an unexpected reversal to lift itself off the ground.

It's evident with Don't Think About It that Sullivan is hungry for recognition. The melodies, the choruses, and the song topics all explore well-charted territory, yet by the end of the thirteen-minute EP, our focus is on Sullivan's vocal talent and her ability to bring detailed settings, real emotions, and vulnerability with these familiar song topics. Ultimately, her ability to resonate with her genre's demographic and simultaneously break out of the confines to give richer context to her songs make her a diverse talent, in a league deserving of the recognition she hungers for, not just one that should be anecdotally accepted.

Recommended tracks (in order): "If I Could Go Back" and "Walk Away."