Forever and Ever – SALES ★★½

Year	Album	Artist	Stars	Score	Genre
2018	Forever and Ever	SALES	★★½	50	Rock	Indie Pop	Bedroom Pop

Forever and Ever by SALES is a stereotypical bedroom pop record, with sweet, dreamy vocals; soft, gentle guitar; do-it-yourself drum programming and production; and teenage diary-style lyrics. For the most part, albums like this are pleasant background music and offer something that’s easy to listen to without having to think too hard about it. There’s something endearing about them and comforting.  

Every track on Forever and Ever is extremely polished and manicured, making it a very consistent listen from beginning to end, and the 33 minute runtime is just about what you’d hope for this style of music. 

But while this album may look the part for bedroom pop, it’s so very vanilla and bland. It’s like someone who thought a little too hard about which outfit to wear at a party so they’d look like one of the cool kids, but they do such a good job that they get lost or ignored in the crowd. 

Everything here is inconsequential. The guitar tracks seemingly consist of no more than 8 notes per song. The drum programming feels like a rhythm loop that comes pre-installed on your guitar pedal that’s meant to help you practice. The vocals are good, but it’s not a voice that’s memorable, and her lyrics are very basic.

It works as good background music that’s inoffensive, but every single song offers the same exact thing, and if you’re looking to analyze an album a little deeper there isn’t really much there. 

A few of the tracks I did enjoy more than others — “Spiral,” “Off and On,” and “Moon Dogs.” I think of the batch, those tracks had a little more energy and had a few more layers of guitar, drum and ambient noise than the others.