Album Review: Haley Reinhart – Better

Before going into Haley Reinhart’s 2016 album, Better, I had admittedly never heard of her name before. Doing some quick research before I listened to the album, I read that she placed third on the tenth season of American Idol, her most popular tracks are covers of Radiohead’s “Creep” and Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love”, which is featured on this record, and she has continued to release albums over the years that have placed on several of Billboard’s genre charts. I had no expectations going into this and as a result, I was very surprised to hear that she is an artist that refuses to be defined by one genre.

My favorite part of the album was quickly the first half, with tracks like “My Cake” and “Better” being very effective at showing off her versatility as an artist and her ability to mess around with her voice. She is not only able to play around with different genres, but she is able to use her voice to fit into those genres seamlessly. If you wanted to place this album in a box, you could possibly get away with calling this a pop record, but then you have songs like “Love is Worth Fighting For” that fit into the jazz mold, and songs like “Talkin’ About” that fit into the funky blues mold. You also can’t talk about this record without mentioning her smash hit cover of “Can’t Help Falling in Love” which pays great homage to the original song.

However, I did come away from this album with mixed feelings, and that is because as well as she does performing in these genres, I did not feel like enough of her own self was coming through the album. Several of the songs felt more like generic radio-friendly music, and while obviously, you want to make music that is going to be widely accessible to an audience, there wasn’t much that she did here that felt out of the box in terms of how she plays around with these genres, and most of the tracks did not stick with me much longer after listening to them. There were a few instances on the album where aspects of the production would slightly switch up but then go back to how it was far too soon, and if she kept parts like that on the album longer, I feel like I would have enjoyed this album much more.

Overall,  I did think this was a good album, even though it’s not the type of album I would go back and listen to. While I would have liked to see her do more on this record to make it feel like a more unique listen, I still enjoyed hearing her belt out her powerful vocals and hearing her do so through different genres and paying great respect to them in the process.