This Is Good

Calling your debut album This Is Good seems like a risky proposition. After all, if it sucks, then the negative reviews practically write themselves. On top of that, it gives off a certain level of presumptuousness that may make it hard to not go into the album looking for reasons to hate it. Thankfully for Hannah Georgas, however, neither of these risks applies: her full-length debut really is, as its title says, good, which means that This Is Good is merely a statement of fact. That said, I’m a little surprised by just how good. I loved her first EP, The Beat Stuff, but there was nothing on it that suggested she was a lot more than just a girl with a guitar. Here, by contrast…she’s a lot more than a girl with a guitar. There are the girl with a guitar moments (see the opening of “Lovesick”), to be sure, but they’re far outweighed by the radio-friendly rock-outs (“Dancefloor” and the title track), the radio-ready folk-pop (“The Deep End”) and the big singalongs with the hints of naughtiness (“Bang Bang You’re Dead”, with its children’s choir and its chorus of “You’re talking shhhhh / ‘Bout me / I’m talking shhhh ’bout you”). Obviously, the common thing running through all those songs is the fact that they’re all primed and ready for mainstream consumption. This is one of those cases, though, where that’s not a bad thing. Yes, This Is Good has the potential to be an enormous hit. But it’s that way because Georgas has written a collection of exceptionally good songs that all happen to be incredibly catchy and dressed up in a way that makes them palatable to a broad swath of people, not because there’s any hint of calculation. This Is Good sounds like a natural expression of Hannah Georgas’ talent…and, thankfully for everyone listening, that’s something she’s got in abundance.