Aaron Carter is no newcomer to the music industry despite being MIA this last decade. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, Carter was the guy every boy wanted to be and every girl wanted to date. His music left little to the imagination by following obvious pop music formulas, making his rise to fame fast and inevitable. His latest EP, LøVë, follows along the same mass market path, this time with a heavy hand in EDM. “Fool’s Gold”, the single off the EP released in April 2016, is easily the most commercial of his latest releases. This song said he was coming back and, much to our disappointment, wouldn’t be singing the same preteen tunes. It was a great tone shift for him as an artist and I jumped right back on his new and improved bandwagon, but altogether the track gave me higher expectations for the album than it ultimately deserved. “Let Me Love You” and “Sooner or Later” were percussive dance tracks, which could have been fine if they were snappy enough. But, with very few lyrics scattered among beats that seemed to drop every 30 seconds, both lost me halfway in. The techno drone of “Same Way” felt like a robot was singing me a lullaby. The slowest of the group, it was a little more melodic, but certainly not enough to sing along to.
It’s easy to say that most of this EP fell flat for me, but if LøVë was headed to hell, “Dearly Departed” was its redemption. It was the only song that felt like the Aaron I danced to when I was ten. Maybe because the lyrics made me nostalgic for his boy band days. With words like “I know you play these games and we both know I like it”, I was having major flashbacks to the boyhood crushes that filled his early work. This track gave me a glimpse at what I thought a more mature Aaron would look like.
This EP let me reminisce about his old sound in “Dearly Departed” and appreciate his new one in “Fool’s Gold”. The rest of the tracks felt like a desperate attempt at a comeback by adhering to popular EDM techniques. He knew that this was the current formula to attract an audience, he created his music with it in mind, but now he needs to find a way to blend his former sound with this modern one. And it may take another album to do it. In that way, LøVë did feel like his first step towards a comeback. Even so, when this EP ended and “Not Too Young, Not Too Old” from his 2001 album Oh Aaron played next, I couldn’t help but ache for his younger days.