Is Spellling Just Trollling on ‘Portrait of My Heart’?

Seriously though, what the fuck even is this?

You can call this an emergency review. Generally, I would wait until the end of year Necessary Evil countdown to air all my bigoted grievances and problematic thoughts (I got a lot of problems with you people), but right now I can’t see this record making the top 40 and if I don’t air my bewilderment I will literally die. I don’t know what this album is. I don’t know what it’s supposed to be. I’m not even convinced how seriously we’re supposed to receive this record and if it’s all just a giant pissstake by Spellling.

Tia Cabral is one of the most notable, daring and artistically unique musicians of the 21st century. By the start of 2025 she had released three and a half* albums of bizarre and beguiling experimental pop genius that seemed to increase in magical power as her career unfolded**. I missed her debut album, 2017’s ‘Pantheon of Me’, but Yea from rateyourmusic.org says “The first half is quite boring for me but the second half is fantastic”, and who are we to question Yea? They’ve never let us down before. Doesn’t sound like an 88/100 review to me, but part of being a Yea fan is accepting their word without question, so we just need to roll with that.

(I gave a half to ‘Spellling & the Mystery School’ as that was largely beefed up re-recordings of Spellling’s previous songs, and my current feeling is that it was roughly half way to being a worthwhile exercise)

**if you don’t include that 0.5 album, I guess, which was her previous release)

Spellling didn’t start rocking my world until their “absolutely astonishing” second album ‘Mazy Fly’ put them straight into the top 10 in 2019. I – along with seemingly every other reviewer – was immediately smitten with Spellling’s unrestrained creativity, their archly experimental takes on pop, and their delightful weirdness. Also, they were wearing a cowboy hat in a barn on the cover, and those of you lucky enough to remember 2019 might remember the discourse around cowboy culture being recaptured by people who weren’t old white men. So they were part of that. They were in the discourse. This discourse was finally blown culture wide when 2019 also saw the release of Old Town Road. So while ‘Mazy Fly’ didn’t provide Spellling’s full breakthrough culturally, they were at least within Lil Nas X’s cinematic universe.

‘Mazy Star’, however, was by no means a big enough success for Spellling to afford their own ambitions. The dreamy yet spooky atmospherics of Spellling’s previous two albums had been a uniquely gothic kind of sci-fi entirely created by microKORG and a vintage Juno-106 synthesisers. But Spellling needed more than that now. She wanted the next record to sound big, which obviously translates to the next album being expensive. This wasn’t 1999 – those pre-Napster days of Sodom when record companies would happily spaff millions of dollars on whatever artist took their fancy considering they would make $765 billion every time Shania Twain scratched her arse – this was early 2020, when even in the couple of months before COVID , artists were no longer allowed to earn money for their work. Spellling took to Kickstarter in February 2020 to request $15’000 to “Help me unite a magical cast of musicians to bring to life a new classic collection of songs… to create The Turning Wheel, an album that requires musicians and collaborators (18 and counting!) to actualize the vision — a cosmic wheel of fortune, floating in the deep black star studded theater of infinite space!”. They eventually made $20’000, so could also afford to make a short film to accompany the album. It’s a shit business. I pledged $65 plus an extra $15 shipping to the UK, to get the album on coloured vinyl and a shirt from the planned tour that never happened due to that aforementioned global Joe Rogan trigger. You’re welcome. I basically made that album.

And ‘The Turning Wheel’ was the absolute breakthrough: an utterly enchanting, kaleidoscopicly dense exploration of human strength through a maximalist space opera fairy tale. Eventually crediting 31 separate ensemble musicians who all contributed their parts remotely during the Pando, you can’t really say it sounds like what it cost, because when it blows your speakers doors out you’d swear it cost fifteen billion dollars rather than fifteen thousand. It was an absolutely astonishing experience that finally got Spellling the attention their talent always deserved. While Spellling’s first two albums were more wildly varied collections of influence, they achieved their greatest artistic and commercial moment by streamlining their goals a lot more. It’s a Kate Bush album, essentially. An amazing Kate Bush album, don’t get me wrong! But it was this slight decrease in originality – alongside the increase in quality – that convinced me to only name it the second greatest album of 2021, debated whether it

Well, Spellling’s influences are far more apparent on their follow up record ‘Portrait of My Heart’. And those influences are not Kate Bush.

The opening title track and lead single is a bit of a bop though. A huge red flag, in retrospect, but a catchy and euphoric, slightly left of centre mainstream rock song. Sure, it’s a bit strange to hear Spellling belt out the whoa-uh-oh-ohs like they’re Sheryl Crow and the song’s picked guitar and echoing drums making the song sound like an MTV Unplugged recording from 1996, but when that soaring “I don’t belong heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere” chorus hits you’ll find yourself not caring about the naffness of the influences. And there are strings! So it’s, like, a really good 1996 MTV Unplugged? George Michael? Was that a good Unplugged? Probably not, right? Whatever, the album starts well, if at least curiously, rather than badly.

The cracks really begin to show on second track Keep It Alive, and not just because it opens with an even longer and more aggressively erroneous “WHOAH-OAH-AH-WHOAH-UH-WHOAH-OH!”, which makes Spellling sound as if they were fronting Crucial Taunt in Wayne’s World.

There’s a lot going on in the verses, betraying an insane amount of overproduction. ‘Portrait of My Heart’ is the first record that Spellling has worked with an outside producer, and Rob Bisel – who has previously shown themself to have great understandings of nuance and subtlety in their work with SZA – obviously attempts to ape the maximalist approach of ‘Turning Wheel’ despite many of the songs seeming more grounded in indie rock immediacy. And, if we’re being honest, almost never good enough as songs to not be overwhelmed by the bombast. And then there’s that chorus, where Spellling absolutely belts out “Get me out of this ordinary life” and the song suddenly sounds as if the protagonists of High School Musical decided to do a rock song. The next song Alibi just is a 90s alt-rock song, just not one of the good ones. It’s the one track I imagine appeared on every Avril Lavigne album which they knew was never going to be a single so decided to ‘let their hair down’. Though I can’t imagine Avril Lavigne ever released anything as muddied by indulgent overproduction as this. Again, it sounds like ‘rock music’ made for children, or for people who have never heard the genre before.

Waterfall settles the ship a lot though. Even though a lot of the same problems remain – overproduction, the fact that it’s evidently aiming to be a ‘Bad Animals’ album track, chorus that might have been cribbed from a Disney Channel movie – it can escape these issues by simply being a really good song. And even though the song, like the rest of the album, generally has the subtlety and nuance of a rectal exam, there are flights of musicianship and creativity noticeable below the sledgehammer production. Then Destiny Arrives comes along and initially decides to shed all alt-rock pretensions to go full on cartoon musical number, a style which Spellling has not been averse to before of course, but in the context of the album it sounds ridiculous in the wrong way (when Spellling is best when they are ridiculous in the right way). I’m sure there’s a great song within Ammunition, but there’s just so much going on that the song doesn’t have the room to breathe that it deserves. And get ready for an almost laughably incongruous guitar solo that I hope at least was played on a clifftop in the wind. Mount Analogue is like Tasmin Archer doing a cover of My Sweet Lord, and is far from the weakest song on the album, but shares much of the record’s unshakable feeling of familiarity: it feels like you’ve heard every melody, every stylistic choice, every vocal inflection, done somewhere exactly the same before. Usually, either on a kids show or a 1990s video game soundtrack. Drain is one of the biggest perpetrators of this: like, I don’t have time right now to listen to all six of their albums to evidence this, but this is definitely a Soundgarden song, isn’t it?? Or can you at least sue someone for ripping off your vibe? Because that Chris Cornell estate could be up for a decent injection. I’m not even sure you’re legally allowed to do this comprehensive a late 80s/early 90s grunge pastiche without a heroin addiction of at least six months, so I hope Spellling’s doing alright. Despite it’s shamelessness, Drain is probably one of the album’s highlights, as that “Into your liiiiiiiife, into your love/Into your liiiiiiiife, into your love” breakdown is astonishingly effective, and the song collapsing into a psychedelic freakout is one of the very few moments on the record where the music earns its usually overbearing production. Satisfaction is lacking in any saving graces though. Imagine one of the lamest early 00s Nu-Metal adjacent aggro-rock bands from back in the day. The kind of band that Limp Bizkit would have as a support act. I’m talking Godsmack, I’m talking Staind, I’m talking Papa Roach. Now, imagine that band needing one more song on the record and only having an hour to record it. In fact, did you know Vanilla Ice did a Nu-Metal album?? Well, you do now. I imagine this is the level of many of the songs on that. Satisfaction isn’t good, man. Love Rays Eyes is an improvement on that at least, but it still sounds like it should be soundtracking Hilary Duff getting a makeover to get over a cheating boyfriend (Kevin Jonas) in some 2008 movie that went direct to DVD.

Then the album ends with perhaps its most surprising turn: a cover of My Bloody Valentine’s Sometimes with the vocals high in the mix instead of being buried under a record label bankrupting amount of still revolutionary production. And… yeah, OK, it’s definitely an interesting choice, and the one moment in the album where I at least raised my eyebrows rather than grimaced and put my head in my hands. But… why? What’s the point being made here? Is it that great songs still exist beneath these feedback heavy shoegaze classics? Because that would make far more sense if the rest of the album was heavily shoegaze influenced, rather than being in thrall to alt-rock, grunge and Nu-Metal. Is Spellling arguing that an excess of production can’t hide a great song? Because, on this album, that’s not really in danger. Or are they simply saying, Hey, you should check this My Bloody Valentine out? Spellling, trust me, literally every single person who has ever listened to one of your albums a) knows who My Bloody Valentine are, b) names ‘Loveless’ as their favourite ever album, and c) Paid £275 to buy the limited edition gatefold vinyl. Preaching to the choir, sister.

A confusing and curious end to a confusing and curious album. I don’t know what to make of it, and I’m not even sure if I’m supposed to take it seriously. It’s no way near as bad as previous artist’s disastrous forays into rock such as ‘Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven‘, ‘Rebirth‘ or… erm… ‘Hard to Swallow‘ (I’m aware that these are all rap artists, which Spelling absolutely is not), because Tia Cabral is far too talented to make something all over bad. But it’s the type of record I just can’t imagine an artist as amazing as Spellling just making. And then releasing. Like, did they ever listen to it? They’re OK with this?

It calls to mind the absolute worst manufactured 90s ‘rock’, but commits the most almighty sin of simply not having songs good enough to pull off a proper tribute. It sounds like the worst of Avril Lavigne at times and not being anyway near as good as Complicated; Meredith Brooks with no Bitch; or even Papa Roach without Between Angels and Insects. Shit, I’d settle for an Been a While sometimes. The production is horrendous, and the songs are very, very rarely good enough to make you forget that. I don’t know what this is, and it upsets me.

Oh, and the title was going to be ‘Is This Spellling Just Jokkking Around’, but I guess that ‘KKK’ might have come across badly.

I give it two baldy Aaron Lewises out of five.