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[thesuper17]

On Punisher, Phoebe Bridgers invites the listener into a meticulously crafted inner world. Its landscape appears initially as bleak and solitary as Bridgers' small form standing on the album's cover, but over time Punisher reveals glimpses of hope and levity, and an abiding care for others, even when they don't care for themselves.

Of her direct contemporaries, Bridgers is perhaps the most prolific, having released at least one project every year since her debut full-length in 2017. Punisher comes on the heels of last year's Better Oblivion Community Center, a collaboration with Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst, and 2018's boygenius EP, written and recorded with fellow singer-songwriters Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus.

Through this constant iteration, Bridgers has honed her tools such that, compositionally, Punisher often resembles the tightest version of the same songs she has been playing for four years now. In many ways, this is a strength. On the refrain of ICU, for example, Bridgers sings "I used to light you up," in a subtly devastating variation on the hook from BOCC's Dylan Thomas. 

Her discography is defined by iteration and the deliberate honing of a specific sound, and there is no hint of chasing current trends, or compromising from the exact type of music she wants to write.

At times however, this insistence leads to a small measure of fatigue as the album circles similar musical ideas throughout its runtime. At odds with its clear positioning as an Album as opposed to merely a collection of singles, listening to the entirety of Punisher in one sitting requires a degree of patience, particularly through the mid-section from Halloween to Savior Complex, where Bridgers is slightly less experimental in her production.

Elsewhere though, the imagination and technical ability displayed in the construction of Punisher elevates Bridgers material to both its most interesting and heartrending form yet. Beginning on lead single Garden Song, a characteristic fingerpicking progression is interlaced with this gently saturated, looping ambient noise, instantly affording the wistful composition a nostalgic, faraway longing.

(The timbre of this intro bears a little in common with the glitchy guitar sounds of You Had Your Soul With You from The National's most recent effort, I Am Easy To Find. The comparison is strengthened further during the chorus when Bridgers is joined on backing vocals by her tour manager, who, in her own words "sound[s] like a Dutch Matt Berninger from The National.")

The vocal processing on title track Punisher is another production highlight. Slightly submerged with a bassy EQ under the instrumental's rippling surface, Bridger's lead vocal is supplemented with quietly beautiful, almost futuristic harmonies. These subtle additions are shed briefly during the second verse's first line: "Here everyone knows you're the way to my heart," a moment of agonizing vulnerability that exemplifies why Bridgers’ fans feel such a strong connection with her art.  

The song is an otherworldy dialogue with Bridgers' musical hero, Elliott Smith, but it's also an astonishingly empathetic portrait of the burdens that come with being loved. A "punisher" in the singer's vocabulary, is a fan so overly enthusiastic they'll corner an artist for a 40 minute conversation when what their idol really wants is rest. Rather than use her platform to put these people down however, Bridgers recognises herself in them, admiring the way her hero was "never not sweet" to fans, no matter how effusive they were.

Throughout, the album is most often concerned with these complex pictures of love and connection. It speaks to the ability to recognise pain or flaws in ourselves and others and love uncompromisingly regardless. The record’s most beautiful moment comes towards the end of Graceland Too, when Bridgers is joined, with no fanfare, by fellow boygenius members Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker. As the song's final refrain loops, the trio commits: "Whatever she wants, I would do anything". The song's specific subject is left unsaid, but really, it's easy to just hear three friends singing the words truthfully for one another.  

[thesuper17]

Lorey Rodriquez's third album, I'm Your Empress Of, is occasionally transcendent, fusing the singer's unconventional and forward-thinking production style with her natural ear for perfect pop melodies. Frustratingly though, this interplay is only balanced just right on a few tracks, with much of the album's brief runtime sounding confused and overly busy.

Rodriquez starts strong, opening IYEO with four songs that are among the best of her career. Moreso than many of her contemporaries, electronic music is a clear influence on Empress Of, demonstrated on the eponymous opening track which features a single loop building slowly over its short run. One could easily imagine the build continuing, eventually tipping over into an electronic dance beat, but its ascent is cut short, interrupted by a spoken word sample from Rodriquez's mother. 

The interjection is both sweet and thematically enlightening for the rest of the record. Rodriquez's mother says having one girl is "like having thousands of girls," for how many aspects and angles there are to her daughter. Again however, being this up front with the theming is something of a double-edged sword for IYEO. While a person can contain multitudes, an album has but 12 tracks, and limited space within them to competently express so many ideas. Empress Of quickly finds herself making awkward compromises to fit the parts of her album together. 

With this interlude fading out, the opening loop returns with some gorgeous disco-influenced guitar parts, before transitioning seamlessly into the second track, an earworm with a significant debt to 90s Europop. 

One of the artist's simplest songs to date, “Bit of Rain” is an effortless-sounding slice of pop, breezily moving between sparse verses with Rodriquez's crystalline voice and a single bouncy synth part, and irresistable choruses, underpinned by a punchy but playful bass and adorned with backing vocal flourishes.

The following two songs (rounding out our first four) demonstrate how strong Empress Of's music can be when she hones her focus carefully. “Void” is a straightforward break-up track, but Rodriquez makes adventurous choices with the production that pay off sonically and thematically. Her voice is modulated, pitch-shifted and even chopped up like a sample throughout, all contributing to the sense of instability and insecurity she's singing about.

“Love Is A Drug”, on the other hand, takes a much more direct theme and plays it straight with the album's second undeniable hook. That the song's refrain repeats so many times in less than three minutes without tiring is testament to Empress Of's expert melodic sensibilities.

Throughout the rest of the album however, this tightly aimed focus wavers, and ideas begin to run across each other. Even more disappointingly, the immediacy of the composition slackens such that a large stretch of the record's latter half is noticeably less sharp and powerful.

With the exception of the excellent “Give Me Another Chance”, the second half of IYEO comprises a run of songs that feel like Rodriguez is trying to compensate for more pedestrian songwriting with unconventional production choices. “Should've”, for example, is a conscious throwback to the artist's debut, employing an odd time signature vocal loop, repeated and developed throughout the track. 

Unfortunately, it feels too deliberate an attempt to recreate the punch of her early material, and despite only being just over two minutes, still manages to take far long to get to the final chorus where its build pays off. In the meantime, bizarre scraping synths, strangely distant vocal mixing and atonal interstitial sections rob the track of momentum and physicality. 

This loss of focus carries through to IYEO's writing as well. Having enlisted her mother to "talk about being a woman... an immigrant... all those things that make you who you are," Rodriquez proceeds to almost totally ignore the idea of identity and its construction throughout the latter parts of the record.

The focus, even on the IYEO's strongest tracks, is firmly aimed at love and heartbreak. These themes are even approached in interesting ways, for example the knowingly pathetic “Give Me Another Chance”, exploring an emotional space not often acknowledged in pop. “Not The One” and “Hold Me Like Water” evoke both sensual physicality ("use both hands") and a more ephemeral, poetic romance respectively.

It's frustrating though, for an album so poised to explore themes with some political and social depth, and for an artist who clearly prides themselves on making forward-thinking choices, that the theming should land in such well-trodden territory. Cynically, one almost feels baited by the promise of the first song.

IYEO is home to a few slick jams, some excellent lyrics and a bevy of interesting ideas stuffed into tracks not quite long enough to house them. Sadly, rather than the cohesive, razor-sharp album experience Rodriguez is clearly capable of, it's destined to be stripped for parts, shoring up more enjoyable playlists and mixes instead.

[thesuper17]

Compiling seasonal singles released throughout the past year, 2019 is an enjoyable, if at-times uneven, stopgap between full Lucy Dacus album releases.

The Virginian singer-songwriter had an industrious 2018, releasing her sophomore solo effort, Historian, in addition to collaborating with peers Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers on the boygenius project.

Her work across the two records demonstrated a mature approach to songwriting, and while they rarely reached the wrenching peaks of her compatriots’ material, tracks like “Salt in the Wound” and “Night Shift” remain masterful exercises in slow-burning rock intensity.

The latter song in particular closes out with a colossal mid-tempo refrain, Dacus’s voice almost drowned out between the pounding fuzz guitar riff and driving snare. Unlike the unrelenting devastation of Baker’s oeuvre though, “Night Shift” offers a small measure of relief, looking forward to a time when the songs that describe her pain ‘sound like covers.’ It even resolves to a major key, inviting the listener to join in imagining the possibility of a better future.

One year on, Dacus remains committed to nuanced and robust songcraft rather than straining for emotional extremities. On 2019’s three original tracks, this ethos produces rich, compelling results, but on the EP’s tranche of covers, it can be difficult to discern what the singer brings to the material.

Although it was the last track to be released this year, “Fool’s Gold” enjoys first billing on the EP, and it’s easy to see why. Tender and empathetic, with a barely concealed seam of melancholy, the song was written after the last person left Dacus’ 2018 New Year’s Eve party. It immediately conjures the scene: an empty room strewn with slightly worn decorations and half empty glasses, a golden afterglow steadily shifting to January blue.

The track begins after the party is already over, and as such, there are no dramatic declarations, no midnight kisses. Despite the occasion’s association with new beginnings, Dacus is more concerned with the worries that are “coming with”. For all the parties she throws, she knows the world was a dark place in 2018 and 2019, and will likely continue to be in 2020. Beyond that, she can offer little certainty. The track’s instantly memorable hook subtly builds in glassy piano and held cello notes, sidestepping mawkish sentimentality in favour of measured understanding.

A double-tracked Dacus enumerates the sources of our collective traumas: family, addiction, religion, ‘the evening news.’ Rather than prescribing an exact problem and solution, she embodies a kaleidoscope of perspectives, and inhabits each with a generosity of spirit that never feels condescending or belittling.

Mid-EP highlight “Forever Half Mast” is a rumination on the ‘daily dissonance’ between joy and shame that characterises America’s relationship with its own history. Its nostalgic slide guitars are deployed almost satirically, as Dacus repurposes the country’s most quintessentially patriotic genre in a plea for accountability. Sharp turns of phrase litter the track, from a commitment to ‘love the beast no matter what it thinks of me,’ to a more honest dressing down of ‘America, the tried and true, the red and white and black and blue.’

Her tendency towards even-handedness perhaps leans towards apologia here - the assertion that America ‘put out [its] palm more than the back of [its] hand’ feels particularly generous – but it’s hard to fault a queer woman for trying to find a path to forgiveness and eventual healing.

The track ultimately boils over in the EP’s most intense passage, all sludgy powerchords and insistent double time drum stabs, but even this dissipates as swiftly as it arrived, with Dacus’s delay-soaked voice melting into the background. There’s no doubt she could sustain her anger for longer, but why bother? She made her point already.

The EP’s four covers are unfortunately far less interesting. The stronger two, renditions of Edith Piaf’s “La Vie En Rose” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” are both recoloured in Dacus’s signature mellow rock palette. Unfortunately, where the dated elements of the original songs are excised, so too are their charms. The resulting recordings feel more like underwhelming originals than exciting reinterpretations.

The latter two covers on the album are, unfortunately, totally skippable. “In the Air Tonight” is attempted with some faithfulness to the original, but Dacus’ ever-restrained vocal performance simply doesn’t fit the song’s iconic explosion. On Twitter, the singer described her cover of “Last Christmas” as a ‘joke,’ and in the spirit of giving, it’s perhaps worth leaving commentary on the song to that*.

While it’s not perfectly consistent, 2019 is a thoughtful way for Dacus to maintain her presence following 2018’s more Serious releases, and if the EP’s original tracks are anything to go by, there’s ample reason to eagerly anticipate the singer’s next full length. She may falter slightly in reinterpreting other people’s material, but ultimately, it only highlights how sharply she writes her own.

[thesuper17]

Living proof

Fifth Harmony’s most successful alumnus has returned with “Living proof,” a bloated and cynical listening experience that indulges all the singer's most grating idiosyncrasies.

Camila Cabello’s first solo release, Camila, was an inoffensive and even occasionally great collection of lean bubblegum pop, boasting enormous chart-topping hits like “Never be the same” and “Havana”. The latter track, lead single for the album, was a near-perfect Latin jam that leveraged Cabello’s honeyed voice in its lower-mid register for a sultry and self-assured debut. It was an expert riposte to concerns that Fifth Harmony’s showiest member would bring her flamboyant vocal tendencies, which occasionally spilled into oversinging, onto a solo release that couldn’t sustain their weight.

Leading up to Cabello’s second full release, “Living proof” is a frustrating realisation of these early concerns. From the song’s opening moments, the listener is subjected to a characteristically unnecessary ad-lib over a plodding, harmonically unadventurous instrumental. Each line of the ensuing verse is delivered with elaborate trembling vibrato and punctuated with dramatic intakes of breath.

The chorus attempts a similar soaring falsetto melody to “Never be the same,” but this time around the singer stretches so high, and leans so heavily on pitch-correction software, that any texture or character in her original vocal performance is sanded away. By the final chorus, multiple backing vocals, ad-libs and high runs contribute to a disorientating deluge of digital noise, and the song’s abrupt end comes as a physical relief.

It’s unreasonable to expect sparkling poetry from a production of this scope – intensely personal or dense lyricism simply wouldn’t be fit for purpose – but Cabello asking her lover to paint her like a Van Gogh (an artist famous for his struggles with mental illness and eventual suicide) just reads as convenient, lazy rhyming. The clunking reference drags the mechanics of the song into focus, immediately puncturing any fiction the listener might have bought into.

Religious imagery peppers the rest of the lyrics which, when combined with Cabello’s constant (albeit assiduously PG-13) allusions to sex, begin to feel lurid and even inappropriate. Exhortations to her lover to let her “make the angels come through” and offers to show them her “demons” if they show theirs, ultimately sound more bizarre than alluring.

It’s worth noting the double-bind female popstars face, in being afforded such little space to write about topics other than sex and relationships but simultaneously needing to sanitize that content for an audience of younger children.

Unfortunately, where that bind is often navigated deftly, (even by Cabello herself, for example, on Camila’s “Into It,”) here the singer merely oscillates between meaningless cliché and sleazy euphemism. Certainly, there’s fertile ground to be tilled in the space between the holy and the profane, but for all its signifiers, “Living proof” isn’t interested in breaking past the surface.  

Everything I wanted

‘On the one hand, it’s hard to feel sorry for the very rich,’ begins John Darnielle on “Short Song for Justin Bieber and his Paparazzi.” Uploaded only to Youtube, the amusing, sub-two-minute tune ultimately conveyed a sincere critique of the invasive and dehumanizing culture of celebrity news.

Of course, at the time, Bieber had done very little to engender sympathetic feeling, and quite a lot to sour his already shaky reputation. In particular, his remarks that Anne Frank could have been a “Belieber” were seen as an impossible-to-parody confirmation of the singer’s unassailable self-regard.

Nevertheless, it was hard to disagree with JD’s assertion that sudden fame, especially when thrust on a teenager, is a double-edged sword. From age 16 onward, Bieber had been subject to equal torrents of slavering adoration and abject hatred, while being completely insulated from ordinary responsibilities and social structures. Without diminishing the harm his mistakes caused, it’s well worth considering whether any young person could deal with those conditions and maintain a healthy interior life.

At the same time Darnielle uploaded his video, an 11-year-old Bieber fan was busy cultivating her own musical talents. 6 years later, Billie Eilish is one of America’s biggest popstars, and judging by “everything I wanted,” the industry and structures that caused Bieber so much harm remain very much intact.

On the singer’s first release since her breakout debut, WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? Eilish has entirely dropped the precocious, sardonic humour that acted as counterweight to that album’s theatrically grim tone. Where tracks like “bury a friend” landed somewhere between jaunty circus and genuine creepiness (think Lana Del Rey in Luigi’s Mansion), the singer’s new release targets a much more authentic expression of darkness.

“everything I wanted” is a fantastic example of Eilish’s talent for restraint. The singer delivers her lines in a fragile, whisper-like cadence, convincingly portraying gloomy dejection over brother/producer Finneas’ gently warbling piano. For a 17-year-old to sing about the depression brought on by her own massive commercial success - and to do so without coming off narcissistic or melodramatic - is a major accomplishment in itself, but here Eilish manages go even further and affect real pathos.

For its vulnerability, the track isn’t exactly unvarnished, and production from Finneas is slick as ever. As Eilish recalls a dream of being “underwater”, her vocal track is submerged with a reverb-soaked fade, and the song’s rhythm section even subtly reprises the hip one-two beat from “bad guy.” All of this is accomplished with a light touch however, never undercutting the song’s bleak atmosphere.  

A ray of hope is glimpsed in the track’s chorus, which describes the comforting quality of Eilish’s relationship with her brother, but this is unfortunately where the track is at its weakest. It’s wonderful that the singer has such a healthy relationship to rely on, (and, for what its worth, great she can sing about a platonic familial relationship rather than being restricted to romantic subject matter), but where the rest of the track displays unexpectedly mature emotional understanding, the chorus descends into more glib second-person encouragement.

This isn’t nearly enough to sink the song, which is among the best of Eilish’s short career. Unlike her teenage idol, she has thus far avoided doing anything incredibly stupid or arrogant. It’s difficult not to feel some sympathy when even though “everybody wants something” from her now, her primary fear remains letting them down. To paraphrase JD again: the industry doesn’t have to leave Eilish alone, but collectively, it should try not to be an asshole.  

[thesuper17]

Don’t start now

The nascent disco revival which has been bubbling in pop this year may have arrived in earnest with “Don’t Start Now”, the first single from Dua Lipa’s as-of-yet untitled sophomore effort.

Having worked with Mark Ronson on the house-influenced “Electricity” last year, Lipa’s new effort bears significant textural similarities to the producer’s recently released Late Night Feelings. That album, along with certain tracks on Carly Rae Jepsen’s 2019 release Dedicated, cribbed stylistic elements from disco (Jepsen’s album was even originally titled Disco Sweat), but both artists interwove homage with slick, modern production choices, perhaps concerned it would be difficult to sell such an historically uncool genre without a knowing wink.

“Don’t Start Now” almost immediately dispels this concern. It commits to the glamorous disco ball aesthetic with gusto, never exhibiting a moment of vulnerability through the powerhouse instrumental to the singer’s defiant delivery.

Cowbell fills, syncopated wah wah guitar and thick electric piano chords all contribute to the effect, but it’s the punchy staccato bassline that provides the track’s rock-solid 70s backbone. Even more so than Lipa herself, the bass, with playfully ascending chromatic tones and octave embellishments, defines the song’s musical character. Large sections of the track, including its devastatingly danceable first hook, comprise of little more than this bassline, a 2/4 drum beat and Lipa’s scathing address to a former lover.

If “New Rules” saw the singer conflicted over an unworkable relationship, “Don’t Start Now” fast-forwards past the heartbreak to hard-won independence. Its literal one-note hook sees Lipa deliver short and decidedly-not-sweet commands to her erstwhile partner: “Don’t show up/ Don’t come out/ Don’t start caring about me now.”

Reading the lyrics alone, one might imagine a façade being constructed here – perhaps she’s trying to convince herself that she’s over it more than anyone else*. Lipa admits that “maybe” the heartbreak did change her, and that it took her time to survive the break. By the final chorus though, self-affirming call-and-response backing vocals and joyous violin accompaniments clad the bare hook in luxurious finery, leaving no room whatsoever for insecurity.

This moment’s infectious kinetic energy, all glitzy detail and impervious confidence, is everything the listener needs to hear to know that Lipa really is just enjoying herself. How could she not be? She won.

*a la Sigrid’s Don’t Feel Like Crying

Now I’m in it

The second single from HAIM’s upcoming record is a likeable but ultimately confused effort that downplays the trio’s strengths in favour of some rather milquetoast electronic experimentation.

The band’s trademark snappy single coil tone is present from the beginning of “Now I’m in it,” but the change in its utilisation is clear immediately. Rather than the intricate riffing of a track like “Something to Tell You,” here the guitar maintains a simple pedalling 16th note, contributing more to the rhythm section than the harmony.

It’s emblematic of production choices made throughout the song, which see the timbre of almost every individual instrument melded into a textural wall. Synths, guitars, drum machine and bass all serve primarily as staging for Danielle Haim’s lead vocal melody. It’s a dense, almost artificial sound, emphasised by heavy post-processing on Haim’s voice.

For a band that built its popularity on sharply-written folk rock tunes with airy, open mixes and organic instrumentation, there is something a little disheartening about the heavy deployment of synthetic sounds here. Even the trio’s last single, “Summer Girl,” despite introducing more adventurous horn instrumentation, maintained this characteristic analogue warmth. 

Disregarding any preciousness about the mere concept of change though, the changes HAIM choose to make on “Now I’m in it” still fail to cohere into anything greater than the sum of their parts.

The band has said “Now I’m in it” is mischaracterised as a break-up song and and is, in fact, about Haim’s struggles with mental health. Using language typically reserved for relationships to describe the singer’s relationship with her own mind is a clever device, but lines like: “I wish you were in my bed,” seem to complicate this reading slightly.

There’s little value in theorising what the singer truly means, particularly where it contradicts what she’s said herself, but the confusion the song has caused does suggest a lack of clarity or focus in its writing. The issue is only exacerbated by the track’s bright, upbeat composition. As Haim sings about trying to find her way out of deep depression, her voice ascends in pitch-corrected falsetto over a bouncing synth beat and full major chords, the instrumental inching ever closer to something resembling Katy Perry’s “Never Really Over.”

Nothing about “Now I’m in it” could be accused of being amateurish, the vocal performances are all tight and Vampire Weekend alumnus Rostam Batmanglij’s piano performance in the song’s middle 8 is, if a little incongruent, a refreshing breath of personality. Frustratingly, competent construction work fails to produce meaning from the song’s largely unrelated building blocks. The end result sounds lost, just not in the way the band intended.      

[thesuper17]

SINGLES ROUND-UP

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"home with you" - fka twigs

“home with you” is the third track to be released leading up to fka twigs’ sophomore full-length, MAGDALENE. It’s a little uneven compared to the stunning “Cellophane” and “holy terrain” but it firmly re-establishes the singer’s commitment to experimentation over comfort.

Separated into a rough ABAB structure, “home with you” is intentionally jarring in its transitions. In the first section, the singer delivers almost atonal, hyper-processed vocals (calling The Knife’s Karin Dreijer to mind) atop creepy synth keys.

Lyrically, this first section is characterised by feelings of alienation and discomfort, with fka twigs lamenting her own success: “The more you have, the more that people want from you/ more you burn away, the more that people earn from you”. 

She points out how she’s never seen a hero like her “in a sci-fi”, a seemingly trivial complaint that alludes to the frustrating inability of her personal triumphs to shift the larger cultural hegemony.

Full piano chords enter to underpin her lines, which are offered up with growing intensity as the whole mix is gradually enveloped in a fuzzy distortion before evaporating completely, prior to reaching any release. 

The B section arrives after a full moment of silence, and immediately evokes a contrasting sense of purity. The distortion and unsettling harmony of the first section is replaced with sweetly melancholic piano and a multi-tracked, choral vocal. In line with the music itself, the singer's words soften, as she considers the feelings of another and commits to their wellbeing. 

The second instance of this B section sees the addition of whirling woodwinds that coalesce above the piano, dislodging the melody from any easily identifiable rhythm. She repeats the last few lines in new formations as instrumentation floats all around like leaves blown up from the forest floor. 

Having spent the rest of the track wanting more than anything to be needed by her "lonely" subject, the singer ends by admitting she never mentioned that she "was lonely too". Unlike the song's beginning, this confession is not alienating. Both her and the song's subject are lonely, it’s true, but some comfort is found in sharing it.

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"Lose You To Love Me" - Selena Gomez

More so than any aspect of her career itself, the personal and mental health struggles of Selena Gomez have dominated the cultural narrative that follows the former Disney actor turned pop star.

After a relentlessly publicised break-up with fellow teenage sensation Justin Bieber, Gomez has stepped in and out of the limelight a few times, and spoken candidly about the support she’s leaned on in the intervening years. Unlike contemporaries, her musical output has been incredibly sparse, and public appearances comparatively rare, nakedly anti-commercial choices made – one can only assume – out of personal necessity, rather than complacency.

All this combines to set a rather strange stage for Gomez’s new single, “Lose You to Love Me”. Other artists, particularly within a genre where universality is revered above all else, might have been tempted to return from an exile with a broad statement of self-empowerment, or at least confident indifference. Gomez takes a more vulnerable route. The much-touted lead single for her second album doesn’t merely reference her past life, it exhumes it entirely, with mixed results.

It’s not a unique conceit by any means. “thank u, next” immediately comes to mind as a point of reference for this kind of pop song as a hyper-visible personal narrative. But where Grande applied a soft touch, somehow knitting her trauma into something light and magnanimous (even meme-able), “Lose You” is anything but. Stubbornly slow-paced and self-serious, the tension between the song’s ostensible truth and its more prosaic, mechanical obligations is difficult to resolve.

There are moments of disarming honesty which are rendered sharper by our shared knowledge of the players. In a normal break-up song, the lament that “In two months, you replaced us/ like it was easy/ made me think I deserved it,” would have some weight, but here it conjures real faces and events, anchoring the pain in a more concrete place.

Mostly though, that power Gomez wields, the listener’s understanding of her specific context, is squandered. It’s pertinent we can imagine the aforementioned line appearing in a generic break-up song, especially considering it’s the most painful depth she plumbs throughout the entire track. There’s a refusal to commit to specificity, or really anything serious enough to risk the song’s commercial potential, and it leaves “Lose You” stranded somewhere between the relatable and the personal, lacking the power either could impart.       

p.s. high-key Inception vibes from the outro piano part, no? ---

"Rare Thing" - Frances Quinlan

“Rare Thing” certainly doesn’t represent a reinvention for Hop Along frontwoman Frances Quinlan, and the attempts it does make towards textural development are alternately enjoyable and disappointing. Nonetheless, the artist’s first solo release is, at the very least, as exciting an example of what makes her one of modern rock’s most compelling vocalists as anything in the band’s back catalogue.

Ever reluctant to pen a simple earworm, Quinlan’s melody sprawls in unexpected directions throughout the track, dislodging to a new key just as the listener’s ear acclimatised to the last. Her timbre effortlessly switches between airy falsetto and the scratchy upper reaches of her register in tandem with a characteristically off-kilter composition and band performance. The most significant departure here is obviously the addition of synths, and while it would be dishonest to suggest they’re transformative on a stylistic level, they offer a fresh palette and do some justice to the individual billing Quinlan commands on the single.

This comes with a slight trade-off: the fluttery strings and intricate guitar lines that pepper Hop Along’s songs are absent here, replaced with denser, full arrangements. Harp-like synth blossoms and a detailed bass line pushed high in the mix ensure the instrumentation never approaches boring, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that something has been lost, more than gained, in the transition from full band to solo artist.

Lyrically, Quinlan is slightly more anchored on “Rare Things” than the fragmented stream-of-consciousness style she adopted for Hop Along’s last release. 

The personal revelations she offers here feel like the fruit of therapy, or at least careful self-consideration, speaking of ‘love that doesn’t have to do with taking something’ and how she ‘only managed to stay small by making giants out of strangers’. This vulnerability is touching, and helps counterbalance a composition which might otherwise risk feeling complex for complexity’s sake.

[thesuper17]

Nostalgia, the kind fomented unnaturally early in a generation forced to confront its imminent end, soaks Titanic Rising, Natalie Mering’s fourth and finest album as Weyes Blood. The record’s warm, luxurious 70s pop arrangements and brief glimpses into Mering’s tender and empathetic interior life serve to underscore the value of what will be lost, and the necessity of treasuring it while it lasts.

Despite its eschatological subject matter, Titanic Rising isn’t a morose, or even explicitly didactic, experience. The 31-year-old was raised in a religious household (albeit subsequently denouncing Christianity), and a fundamental search for belonging and meaning feels as close to the center of Titanic Rising as its clear-eyed recognition of the coming ecological catastrophe. 

It could easily sound glib to claim, as Mering did in an interview with Pitchfork, that one should “have a smile during the apocalypse and be grateful for whatever conditions exist, because life is a beautiful thing,” but on Titanic Rising, she dispels cynicism with full-hearted commitment to all the beauty left to salvage.

Mering has pointed to religious music as a particular influence on her output, not in terms of content, but staging. Grand cathedrals, at once meticulously ornate and cavernously open, these vast, high-ceilinged chambers feel like a natural arena for the compositions on Titanic Rising. 

Opener “A Lot’s Gonna Change”, for instance, begins in humble simplicity but soon blossoms into a lush orchestral arrangement, all swooping strings and long-held ascending vocal harmonies. The song is an overture to Mering’s approach on the rest of the album, demonstrating her penchant for broad, melancholic melodies and stark but tragically optimistic lyricism.

These tendencies coalesce on the stunning centrepiece, “Movies”, a stirring and poignant lament that real life could approach the deliberate meaning of cinema. On a meta-level, within the self-contained world of the record, Mering achieves her wish. 

"Movies" unfolds in distinct sections, not unlike the separate acts of a film. Its stage-setting, submerged synth arpeggios move subtly as the singer enters: ‘This is how it feels/ to be in love,’ (alluding to the function of art in not only reflecting emotional dynamics but producing them). Again, there is a near-religious sense of ceremony, of slow-moving bodies gradually aligning, led by Mering’s multi-tracked voice.

After building to a sustained perfect cadence, the track is interrupted by a flurry of strings, dry and staccato in contrast to the dreamy build-up that preceded them. A single bass drum pulse corrals the flock into formation and the high-drama second act takes shape. Guided by singular desire, Mering repeats ‘I wanna be/ the star of my own movie,’ her falsetto climbing intervals in a crystalline timbre. The intensity of this movement gathers and crests with a final high ‘my own’, before sloping to a mellow denouement, peaceful but not satisfied.

The filmic quality of “Movies” is clearly indebted to composers like Brian Eno and – as astutely observed by Alex Denning for Dazed – Gavin Bryars’ minimalist opus “The Sinking of the Titanic”, from which Mering’s title is inverted. Her broader palette however, is drawn from the soft-rock and pop of artists like The Carpenters, Harry Nilsson and even The Beach Boys.

The attention to detail with which Titanic Rising reconstructs these profiles is both technically stunning and wholly aligned to the record’s thematic intent. Describing that intent, Mering carefully distinguishes her desire to make something “sorrowful” rather than depressing, illuminating the world’s majesty and leaving context to shape the atmosphere around it. 

That the artists she venerates are so often given to an intimate conception of that duality of love and melancholy (as in Close To You), only contributes further to the record’s synchronicity of theme and construction. 

On “Wild Time” Mering addresses ‘the rising tide’ - both a direct reference to the climate catastrophe and a more general allusion to the instability gripping our cultural, economic and technological institutions. Here, as in “A Lot’s Gonna Change”, her nostalgic yearning targets the neatness of childhood, before the world’s contradictions laid themselves bare. In this way, “Wild Time” addresses a personal loss of innocence as directly as it does the re-configuring of social structures under late Capitalism and global warming.

Constantly shifting tonality between major and minor (reminiscent of a Joni Mitchell composition), the song eludes simple categorisation, refusing to signpost the listener a one-dimensional response. Its overall sonic character is analogue and warm, with thick bass guitar confidently underpinning Mering’s modulating melodies. 

A gliding and pensive wordless middle 8 section gently floats the song to its final chorus, whereupon the singer locks on to a steady note for the word ‘time’ rather than the shifting pattern she adopts prior. The note holds fast while all around her, strings, drums and keys forcefully ascend, again suggesting Mering’s hopeful resolve against total uncertainty.  

More contemporary reference points for Weyes Blood like Father John Misty (lampshaded by Phil Elverum in “Now Only”, where he talks to the two of them about songwriting ‘in the backstage bungalows’) and Lana Del Rey differ from Mering in their elevation of wry cynicism over sincerity. Sincerity is one of Titanic Rising's most commendable traits, but should Mering have immersed the album in earnest sentiment entirely, it would’ve risked buckling under the weight of self-seriousness. 

In discussion with Mark Kermode on Ari Aster's Hereditary, film critic Robbie Collin brings up the idea that brief winking moments of humour can act as a 'steam valve' for the audience, allowing intense experiences to avoid tipping over into overwhelming ones, where they become parody.

On Titanic Rising, "Everyday" functions in precisely this way. Accompanied in video by a whimsical send-up of vintage slasher films, the track is a relentlessly bouncy and upbeat exploration of the re-organisation of love in a digital age. Without ever explicitly breaking character, "Everyday" lets in a small current of air that actually imbues the parts of the album played straight with more power. 

Instructively, Mering has said "I'm actually really sincere. But I feel like humour is a part of the great cosmic question." Rather than morbidly drilling down on a singular theme, she successfully evokes a kaleidoscope of experience and emotion. Humour, just as misery or elation, is part of what comprises a full life: 'It all just overlaps.' 

"Everyday" strikes this intersection most cleanly with a line in its third verse: 'True love, is making a comeback/ for only half of us the rest of us feel bad.' The heartbreaking purity and tenacity of its first half is so immediately deflated in the second, it's almost impossible not to crack a smile. A gorgeous and kitsch electric piano flourish cascades beneath Mering's voice to drive home the absurdity.  

It is these smaller, intimate moments on the record, as it is in life, that invoke real wonder. The drum fill before the second chorus of “A Lot’s Gonna Change” or the duelling slide guitar motif in "Andromeda". The deeply personal ode to a friend who passed on "Picture Me Better", where Mering offers only kindness and understanding 'We finally found a winter for your sweater/ got a brand new big suit of armour'. 

Titanic Rising is replete with pockets of surprising beauty, weaved carefully through its construction, its homage, its themes, its heart. In this delicately manufactured capsule, filled both with artefacts from a collective cultural memory and thoughtful preparation for a stormy future, Mering makes her case for hope; that both the past and present contain splendour worth holding onto.

[thesuper17]

“Tokyo”, Julien Baker's new single, begins with a highly processed guitar loop, an arpeggiated chord which quickly swells and cuts in mechanical repetitions. Its lack of progression and uncomplicatedly major harmony evokes the artificial sounds one might hear in a city like Tokyo, perhaps heralding a tannoy announcement or warning the train doors are about to close. 

This kind of experimentation is a welcome development for Baker, whose two albums thus far, 2016's Sprained Ankle and the following year's Turn Out the Lights, have largely tread and retread familiar musical ground, to admittedly devastating results.

It is something of a disappointment then, when Baker's instantly recognisable Telecaster single coil chimes over the top of the loop with a mid-tempo four chord progression and the singer begins reproducing the vocal melody from Turn Out's “Shadowboxing” almost exactly. The intrigue created in the song's opening moments dissolves with the arpeggio itself, and Baker slips back into mostly comfortable territory for the remainder of the track.

This is far from fatal though. To paraphrase the famous quote, fear not the writer who writes 1000 songs, but the writer who has written one song 1000 times. The principle has held true for The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle and it does for Baker on “Tokyo”, which is a composite of the young artist's favourite devices, slowly building from spare and dejected to gut-wrenching and massive.

Singing with the same self-excoriating judgement that permeated songs like “Even”, Baker admits she 'never learned how to come down without burning up on the runway'. While she travels across the world now, she can't escape the damage she's left behind, the 'imprint' her body left. At the track's emotional peak, she commits to maintaining her distance: 'you want love/ this is as close as you're gonna get,' desperately trying to insulate herself and those around her from more pain, all the while sounding totally submerged in it.

“Tokyo” is filled with the kind of subtle touches of craft Baker has spent the last few years steadily adding to her arsenal, like the distorted, crackly piano keys that haunt the latter half of the first verse, sounding like they were recorded through a broken radio. Particularly powerful are the marching band drum rolls which serve as the only percussion during the song's inevitable explosion into Baker's higher register belting.

Eventually, the predictability of Baker's fundamental musical choices may lessen the emotive weight her music carries. For now though, she has honed her specific strengths so carefully that rather than tired, “Tokyo” sounds as urgent and immediate as the best of her back-catalogue.

[thesuper17]

... or your devil!

Two versions of Angel Olsen's upcoming release, All Mirrors, were recorded this past year. One features just the singer and her guitar, the skeleton of each song and nothing else, while the other sees her surrounded by a full band and 14-piece orchestra. 

Once upon a time she planned on releasing the two versions as a double-album, but on hearing them in their expanded form, Olsen decided she couldn't deny 'how powerful and surprising the songs had become,' and chose to release only the full-band version.

The above anecdote is intriguing for a couple of reasons. Olsen, like many smaller musicians met with success, has steadily bolstered her sound over the years. The sparse folk of Half Way Home was corralled into a loose rock shape on followup Burn Your Fire for No Witness, and by 2016's MY WOMAN, Olsen had a full band accompaniment for the entire tracklist, and flirted with synth-pop and piano balladry.

Throughout this process of building however, the foundation upon which it all rested - delicately grazing guitar and Olsen's haunting, glassy vocals - remained the ultimate focal point of nearly every track. In her released discography, Olsen's performance, and by extension the singer herself, feels palpably close to the listener. The near-whispered confessions of longing on tracks like ‘White Fire’ evoke a sense of privacy, as though one has stumbled into Olsen's interior monologue itself. Exceptions exist, of course, most notably in the raucous punk rock of MY WOMAN's lead single 'Shut Up Kiss Me', but even there, Olsen leads with singular energy, leaving the rest of the band to follow.

2017's Phases, a collection of covers, B-sides and demos, bucked the expansionist trend of Olsen's mainline albums. It is perhaps her most hushed, minimalist output to date, many of its tracks consisting of just a few strummed chords and ghostly, low-sung lyrics. It is also some of her most arresting and spellbinding material yet. 

An understated cover of Bruce Springsteen's ‘Tougher Than The Rest’ forms the heart of the record, and the image of Springsteen, this lone American folk hero with a melancholy heart, seems a fitting reference point for the Olsen of Phases. The collection's country-inflected closing track, 'Endless Road’, is a short, simple tune that briefly invites the listener close as she wanders, aching for a resolution permanently out of reach.

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This closeness exists in pockets during ‘Lark’, the most recent single to be released from the upcoming All Mirrors, particularly at the beginning, as though to lull the listener into a sense of familiarity. The orchestra then erupts with frenetic, angry force, pushing forward and upwards, and suddenly Olsen is yelling the melody just to be heard. Between melodic repetitions, the strings scratch up to the next chord tone and Olsen's position in the chaos becomes even more indistinct. The pounding bass drum motif and wild, swaying strings constantly threaten to engulf her completely. We are not close now.

The track continues expanding and shrinking formlessly, never allowing the listener the comfort of predictability. Its structure is impressionistic, instruments fade away for a softly sung verse before sharply re-entering, sometimes pushing Olsen out of the frame entirely. Towards the song's climax, the violins flutter upwards in discordant intervals before swirling into a hypnotic two note repetition, reminiscent of the unsettling string melodies in Radiohead's ‘Burn the Witch’. Olsen mirrors the melody, singing just two words: 'dream on,' over and over. Rather than leading here, it is as though she has been drawn up into a churning storm. 

A brief calm once again falls, and Olsen puts to the song's subject: 'You say you love every single part [of me]'.  This respite leaves the listener unguarded before the song's final salvo, an anguished howl asking: 'what about my dreams?' The song was conceptualised after an argument Olsen had with a friend 'about trust and support', and this last explosion of guttural pain most starkly illuminates that distance, between loving a person for who you want them to be and allowing them to define that themselves. Even after her vocals give out though, the orchestra smolders away, drifting downwards and collapsing with one last minor modulation, as if to deliberately mark its independence from the singer.

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There is a seemingly universal temptation to collect and view art from every possible angle. The popularity of demo tracks, extended editions and director's cuts of films illustrates this impulse, as fans consume their favourite media in any number of iteratively different versions. Even full album re-imaginings, totally altering the tone and structure of a work, find their audience in the completionist fan.

It is according to this instinct that Angel Olsen's decision to initially release only the full orchestral version of All Mirrors (the original version will undoubtedly see the light of day eventually) momentarily feels a disappointing one. Why not simply release both? How could more content be bad? 

There is value, however, in experiencing an artist's most direct expression of their work, undiluted by potential alternatives. ‘Lark’ is a moment of genuine transition for Olsen, seeing her aching, personal lyricism imbued with filmic pathos and drama. It's challenging - her close, quiet longing having always comprised such a significant part of her sound and appeal, but then, Olsen is up to the challenge. This transition simply wouldn't be possible without the addition of new instrumentation, and so more than simply filling out the frequency range, the orchestra can be understood to structurally underpin Olsen's artistic growth. It may be tempting, especially for those disappointed by such a marked shift in Olsen's sound, to wait for the stripped back version, but All Mirrors deserves to be met on its own terms. 

Announcing the song, Olsen said 'It’s easy to promise the world to those we love, but what about when our dreams change and values split?' Her dreams do seem to have changed; the starkly minimal reveries of her early material have given way to something altogether closer to nightmares on the new record. Ultimately, it may not be possible to make any promises, but across her discography Olsen has earned a level of trust that makes the departure of All Mirrors an exciting prospect rather than an alarming one.  

[thesuper17]

If there's reason to regret Jack Antonoff's pervasive influence over the sound of pop in 2019, it isn't to be found in Taylor Swift's new single, The Archer.

After the juvenile 'ME!' and dispiritingly cynical 'You Need To Calm Down', Swift's newest effort is understated and reflective in a way the singer hasn't shown since 2014's 1989. Gently pulsing synths propel the song forwards, while Swift's vocals are encased in warm reverb and softened into the mix. Antonoff describes the song as 'very simple', containing only two synths and a drum kick - 'a big wall of low end' to support the weight of Swift's confessional lyrics. A skillfully subdued vocal performance sidesteps self-indulgence however, and even as the composition builds to a characteristically intense middle eight, the song maintains a submerged, dreamlike quality. 

The slight decentring of Swift musically mirrors the song's writing, which proves her still capable of the emotionally incisive lyricism that was instrumental to her initial ascent as a teenage prodigy. She's still singing about Taylor Swift, but rather than a cartoonish exhibition of her manufactured personal dramas, or a focus-grouped show of solidarity long after it could have been considered transgressive, 'The Archer' is a song characterised by questioning and self-doubt. It would be naive to suggest the Swift of this song is any more authentic than another - how could one know? But at least here she's interesting. 

In atmosphere and approach, 'The Archer' feels of a piece with 1989's closing track, 'Clean'. Both contain references to the state of her room as a representation of her interior life. Alarmingly, the 'dust that covered' it in 'Clean' has given way to 'fire, invisible smoke' here. Both see Swift wrestling with this internal disarray, but where 'Clean' resolves to the promise of healing, 'The Archer' ends with more uncertainty. She asks throughout who could stay by her side and remains hypothetical through the end, suggesting, but not knowing, 'you could stay'. 

notes.

Has Jack Antonoff been watching Stranger Things?

Swift's winking reference to 'The Archer' being track 5, (where it's suggested she traditionally places the most vulnerable track of an album) immediately undercuts the fleeting notion of authenticity she conjured during its runtime. Oh well. 

[thesuper17]

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

[thesuper17]

As Basic, (the third track on Norwegian pop sensation Sigrid's debut album Sucker Punch), reaches its final chorus, the glossy instrumental and multi-tracked vocals seamlessly fade into a phone recording. Strumming the acoustic guitar, a convincingly unprocessed Sigrid performs the first 8 bars of the chorus before the full studio accompaniment returns to deliver the final hook in bombastic fashion. It's a clever device, zooming in on the unadorned skeleton of the song to heighten the drama of it's climactic conclusion, while reminding the listener of the human heart at the centre of this polished production. It's clever, and it's also a near identical reproduction of the technique used in Supercut by Lorde on her 2017 album, Melodrama.

While nothing else on Sucker Punch is indebted quite so clearly to any particular artist, the album nonetheless displays almost no originality or invention. 80s bouncing synth basslines, 90s pseudo-rap hooks and 2010s soaring EDM melodies are stitched together in an optimistically wide net, hoping to catch as universal an audience as possible. The barefaced cynicism of the project would be enough to write it off completely but for two saving graces. Firstly, Sigrid herself carries off her part in the production masterfully, delivering the carefully crafted melodies with soft restraint and full-throated belts as the situation demands.

More importantly however, while experimentation has its own self-evident merits, mainstream pop is an iterative and nostalgic genre. Ideas can be revisited time and again, and feel just as impactful as they did the first, provided their configuration is fresh and their execution is flawless. While very little of Sucker Punch could be described as flawless (and some could be considered quite the opposite), there's certainly enough reason here to watch where Sigrid goes next.

Like a lot of up-and-coming pop artists, Sigrid's career thus far has mostly felt like a vehicle for giant, air-dominating singles. Strangers, perhaps the most ubiquitous of these singles, is unsurprisingly the strongest Sucker Punch gets in its sub-40 minute runtime. The song's build from verse to pre-chorus to chorus is mathematically precise, ascending grand piano chords, soaked in reverb and accompanied by a distant whirling synth, gather and coalesce before dropping away entirely, two beats before Sigrid's thunderous return. In contrast to the misty, faraway texture of its buildup, the chorus' acrobatic vocal run is given almost military foundations, a thick staccato bassline and galloping drums.

These transitions, between verse and chorus, or chorus and middle-eight, are the most consistently satisfying parts of Sucker Punch. If nothing else, they are the primary times the listener can enjoy the stunning tonal quality of Sigrid's voice, relatively unencumbered by the album's frequent and cloying overproduction. For the title track's final chorus, Sigrid belts the first line acapella in a purposeful demonstration of both her formidable vocal ability and Sucker Punch's dynamic athleticism. Late album highlight Never Mind sees the singer try on a quiet, scratchy falsetto atop twinkling keys for the final pre-chorus. As in Basic, the tiny (and likely deliberate) imperfections in the performance suggest vulnerability, lowering the listener's guard before the bouncing bass and anthemic chorus hit one more time.

These affected flaws are utilised elsewhere on the album and speak to the only identifiable lyrical theme Sigrid carries between more than one song: authenticity. When her voice crackles and strains hitting the high notes of In Vain's chorus, it tells the listener she hasn't been polished to a mirror sheen like those other pop stars. The irony is, of course, that her straining voice, like her makeup-free face and assertions of individuality, are as consciously constructed as any pop star's image. This friction is made all the more difficult to ignore by the utterly unadventurous choices made throughout the album's composition and production. Sigrid ostensibly wants the listener to gravitate to her as an individual, but provides precious little evidence she has anything individual to offer. Fortunately, she really doesn't have to. Sucker Punch may be a synthesis of recycled ideas, but they're ideas that work. They always do.

[thesuper17]

2018′s most impactful musical moments

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nobody key change

If Be The Cowboy, Mitski Miyawaki's fifth album, is as interwoven with artifice as she suggested in an interview with Pitchfork shortly before its release, it only makes lead single Nobody a more beguiling accomplishment. A purer expression of longing than the opening line: 'My god I'm so lonely/ so I open the window/ to hear sounds of people', could scarcely by imagined, but evidence of a distance between Nobody's author and its lead character is provided in the song's meticulous craft and execution. That duality, between ostensibly real anguish and sparkling production sheen, is where Nobody lives, a version of the ubiquitous struggle more potent than the reality. Disco keys and syncopated rhythm propel the song forward even while Mitski sings of stagnation and hopelessness, and during the second chorus, she intones loneliness again and again, in rising arpeggios that begin to push into her falsetto range. Just as Mitski's delivery seemingly peaks in intensity, the chord progression beneath her shifts up a semitone, and she redoubles, hitting the same high B which formed the dominant 7 of the C# arpeggio she sang over the previous chord, now a 9 over A minor. The subtlety of the melodic movement Mitski employs over this key change is delivered in stark contrast to its proud and bombastic standard deployment. Nevertheless, the drama of her declaration is heightened a notch further in this instant, and it is her commitment to the technical, rather than the raw expression of emotion, that facilitates this. Perhaps Mitski is weaving a story in Nobody, but it's her mastery as both empath and composer that see it land with such weight. -

everyday is an emergency - first half

In many ways Aviary and Have You In My Wilderness, the two most recent albums released by Los Angeles musician Julia Holter, feel more accurately characterised by the other's title. Wilderness saw Holter refine her previously sprawling arrangements and compositions to so many beautiful birds, purposeful in form and deliberately contained in scope. By the close of Aviary's first track, by contrast, the listener is already lost in Holter's wilderness, as vast, uncompromising and beautiful as it has ever been. Nowhere is the wild landscape of Holter's id, actively hostile to those who would try to derive a singular interpretation, more keenly evoked than during the first half of Everyday is an Emergency. Horns, strings and wordless vocals collide, unmoored to rhythm or any consistent harmony, their only direction an agonizingly slow, spiralling descent in pitch. Held notes begin in the upper registers, separated by semitones, and only briefly hinting at chords as if by the random incidence of related pitches occurring at once, before slipping back up against each other in grating disharmony. As other instrumentation joins the procession and the overall pitch finds a resting point, the abrasive cacophony recedes to a near-hypnotic drone. The listener is immersed for over a minute before a complete break, whereupon a melancholy, cycling melody emerges over rich grand piano chords. The second half of the track matches this haunting repeated melody to a recursive lyrical structure, in what is effectively a new song entirely. It's beautiful and, to the extent that Holter ever is, conventional, but it's also an oasis, a brief moment of calm found in the eye of an intense storm. Only after enduring the intense disquiet of the first four minutes are listeners granted entrance to this understated space, but Everyday is an Emergency is not designed to challenge. Holter plainly does not regard the accessibility of her music one way or another, she simply sketches the sprawling geography of her wilderness and leaves the listener to navigate.

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sobbing and eating eggs again

Nearly every review of A Crow Looked at Me and its 2018 follow up Now Only does Phil Elverum a disservice by likening him to Mark Kozelek. On the surface, it is easy to draw comparisons between the recent work of Sun Kil Moon and Mount Eerie: Benji and A Crow both feature sparse arrangements of acoustic guitar over which frank reflections on life and death seem to spill, without edit or filter. Beyond similarities in form however, the two could not do more to evince opposing characters if it was intentional. Where Kozelek makes it his prerogative to 'find a deeper meaning' in the death of a cousin he says he 'had pretty much forgotten all about', Elverum understands the futility of even keeping Geneviève Castrée, his deceased wife, whole in his memory ('you did most of my remembering for me'). On Now Only's title track , he approaches the question of meaning more directly, of how his wife died 'for no reason' while he could only watch, and notes the absurdity. In this absurdity though, a form of coping, even humour, is found. It is not humour to laugh to, and it's not the homophobic or misogynistic jibes of Kozelek either, rather it’s a reminder that, for those still here, life continues. A near-obsessive thread of record-keeping pervades A Crow, of noting the exact number of days or weeks it has been since Geneviève passed, and the active effort Elverum makes to continue day after day seems no easier to rally a year on. But he does, and the majority of that effort goes into creating some version of normalcy for a daughter who has lost her mother. The absurdity comes to a head on Crow, Pt. 2, in which Elverum describes the shape of their new family life in mundane details, of living, talking about school and making food. Over breakfast, his daughter asks to hear 'momma's record', and as Elverum watches her piece together an understanding of loss from the sound of her mother's voice, he sings: 'I'm sobbing and eating eggs again'. He suggests earlier, on the title track, that the most devastating waves of grief have already begun to subside, and will eventually fade almost entirely, but life won't wait for that. Crow, Pt. 2 is the sound of Elverum experiencing the meantime, knowing eventually the sobbing will go, and the eggs will remain. For now though, he lives with both. -

let that boy come home

Deciding the moral victor of last year's Pusha-T/Drake's beef is a complex task. Pusha's verses incorporated real low-blows, and whether his purist approach to hip-hop helps or hurts the genre is a philosophical question. Luckily, determining the actual victor is incredibly simple. With hindsight, the closing track of Pusha's DAYTONA, Infrared, feels almost like bait. In enticing the world's biggest hip-hop artist to respond directly to him, Pusha ensured the maximum audience would be waiting for his inevitable counter, and he held onto the crucial detail just long enough for that moment to arrive. Throughout his 2018 album, Pusha's incredibly deliberate flow and inimitable swagger, combined with top-shelf beats from Kanye West on rare form, saw lines hit with a blunt force. The weight of his kingpin boasts was held up by the sheer quality and confidence of his delivery, and everyone, inside and out of the hip-hop scene, was in his sights. There's nothing blunt about The Story of Adidon. Pusha's 'surgical summer' begins tracing Drake's family life, with jibes at his absentee father that initially glance off as irrelevant, but details begin to paint a picture, and the smirk on Pusha's face is almost audible as he draws closer to his target's shame. Finally, the instantly iconic: 'You are hiding a child'. Pusha nearly caricatures his own delivery here, drawing out every word of the killing blow just to savour it a little longer, the 6 syllables last an eternity. Hip-hop beefs, and the genre more widely, often exist within a sort of stylized fiction, where actors are hypermasculine, dangerous and uncaring figures. Even though Pusha embodies this archetype completely, The Story of Adidon flips the trope on its head, targeting Drake specifically for his pride and those things 'deeper than rap', even telling him how to put things right. It's almost kind, and it's complete obliteration.    

[thesuper17]

KELELA’s Take Me Apart and ST. VINCENT’s MASSEDUCTION, two of 2017’s standout releases, bear very few similarities. Among them are the immediate, familiar satisfaction of music built atop a pop framework, the melodic sensibility of a charismatic central performer as a musical through line, and the fact that both received radical re-imaginings in 2018, in the form of TAKE ME A_PART, THE REMIXES, and MassEducation [1].

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If Take Me Apart and MASSEDUCTION could be argued to occupy one broad genre designation, albeit about as far apart within those conventions as possible, these reworks represent each artist’s attempt to push their compositions away from any homogenising strictures. With liberation from the commercial considerations of a new mainline album release, both were constructed with freedom to commit wholly to the impulses that sparked their conception. Here, it is important to express those impulses are as distinct as the music itself. In fact, MassEducation and THE REMIXES are mirror inversions in almost every meaningful decision a work must take, each informed by a completely disparate set of goals and experiences.  

 In plotting them as points along the journeys of individual artists working in separate contexts, these releases can be understood, not as standard-bearers for competing musical ideologies, but as demonstrations of how wide the world can be, and how much beauty can be found in every corner.

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Consistently, critical reception of MASSEDUCTION made two assertions about the album and its author. It was Annie Clark’s most definite step yet into Pop, and, perhaps consequently, her most direct and personal release so far [2]. Clark’s erstwhile output, beginning with 2007’s Marry Me, was hailed for abrasive and experimental production, ‘all razor sharp filthy guitar and melodica exuberance’, but MASSEDUCTION was a sea change [3]. Collaboration with Jack Antonoff (producer: Lorde, Taylor Swift) saw her songs pulled taut into lean pop shapes, and Clark narrowed her writing focus to match, singing mostly of her life in the city. MassEducation is a vindication of those readings. It is the apotheosis of St. Vincent’s shedding her artifice. Gone are the saturated guitars, the sci-fi synths, any additional voices or modifications to Clark’s own. All it offers is the piano performance of friend and frequent collaborator Thomas Bartlett, and unaltered, single takes of Annie Clark singing the words and melodies of MASSEDUCTION.

 In a handwritten letter announcing the release of MassEducation, Clark describes the process and its result as ‘two friends playing songs together with the kind of secret understanding one can only get through endless nights in New York City’ [4]. Recorded over just two days during the mixing of MASSEDUCTION, there truly is a sense when hearing MassEducation that the listener has stumbled into something quite private. Perhaps live rehearsals for the final album vocal takes, if not for the obvious effort undertaken in rearranging the songs so masterfully for piano.

 Bartlett’s intuition for when to reproduce the original songs’ harmonic beats exactly and when to deviate slightly to take advantage of the timbre of his instrument demonstrates remarkable fluency, in control of his craft but also the direction of the music. His performance rises and falls to match Clark’s own, bringing to mind the alternately delicate and pugilistic playing on Fiona Apple’s The Idler Wheel, and contributing throughout to a feeling that every moving part of MassEducation is being compelled towards a single unifying point. The result is an album so consistent in overall texture, so committed to the compositions themselves, that a conspiratorial listener could conceive of it as a sort of self-imposed test by Clark. Austrian classical composer Artur Schnabel described the piano as ‘the most neutral instrument’, one which retains no characteristics of its own, and reflects only the music played upon it [5]. Here, it could be argued, Clark reveals the songs of MASSEDUCTION in their Platonic ideal, with no distortion or augmentation, and asks if they alone are enough.

 The limitations of this interpretation are immediately obvious. Positioning the piano, an instrument indelibly tied to Western traditions and historically those practiced near-exclusively by white men, as the neutral default method of musical expression raises some troubling spectres. It’s also an instrument that, particularly in hands as capable as Bartlett’s, evokes a wonderful and unique texture all its own. Whether MassEducation’s recordings are truer interpretations of the songs is a philosophical question. What can be said assuredly is that in its palpable intimacy, in its tiny imperfections, in two days of recording, ‘Intuitive. Discovered. Raw,’ Clark and Bartlett created a quiet companion to MASSEDUCTION that expands the album’s universe while beckoning the listener closer in than ever.

  -

 The words of Take Me Apart cover well-worn themes: sex, love, getting together, breaking up, but the songs position those big, significant moments contextually. They are the subject in the foreground, not the whole picture. Kelela takes time to paint in the edges, anchoring her declarations and admissions in a nuanced but real emotional place. Ending a relationship is sad, the addition ‘that they gave it their best/ but you still gotta roll’ evokes a more aching pain, of desperately holding onto a partner who has already grown apart.

 Her instinct to thoroughly unpack the complexities of any situation she writes about is mirrored in Kelela’s approach to TAKE ME A_PART, THE REMIXES. While the original album’s dark and ultramodern production would go on to elicit widespread praise, Kelela wrote in a press release announcing THE REMIXES she had obsessed over those choices, and that ‘[her] only solace was knowing that the songs would be reimagined in this way’ [6]. It is an ambitious, collaborative work which breaks the original album into its constituent building blocks before completely reshaping and structuring them. 20 tracks are split between many more collaborators, with some songs appearing in multiple new iterations. LMK, for example, is recontextualised as the hook to an all-female posse cut (the fantastically named: What’s Really Good remix), while elsewhere it is dissected and rearranged in dark pulsing repetition on the Mountain remix.

 The sheer scope of THE REMIXES is notable, particularly in light of its producers who, with a few exceptions, are by no means household names. Kaytranada and serpentwithfeet are perhaps the most recognizable, while the remaining 18 tracks are entrusted to a list of mostly underground but demonstrably skilled artists. While Kelela’s first official EP was released in 2013, her first taste of mainstream attention has come in the aftermath of Take Me Apart, and with THE REMIXES, she is eager to immediately leverage that attention to lift up her fellow working musicians [7].

 THE REMIXES is no charitable endeavour though, and each of the tracks (stylized as file names complete with BPM attached) earns its place with clear direction and polished execution. The Skyshaker remix of Onanon floats Kelela’s vocals over a brooding grand piano accompaniment before cutting and shaping them into a new melody, looped over a driving bass drum groove. In the ambient, ‘NO BPM’ Kareem Lotfy remix of Turn to Dust, the original orchestral instrumental becomes glacial, devoid of warmth or deliberate motion. Despite removing the vocals almost entirely, it is one of the most haunting and resonant experiences in the collection. It is emblematic of what THE REMIXES offers: Take Me Apart, along with Kelela herself, obliterated, deconstructed and refracted in 20 new directions. THE REMIXES doesn’t simply add to the canon of Take Me Apart, it suggests infinite possibilities, innumerable ways to experience, interpret and understand.

 -

 Even in the minutiae, as though by design, Kelela and St. Vincent’s reimaginings diametrically oppose one another. Where MASSEDUCTION’s uppercase stylisation is dropped, THE REMIXES’ title is raised. Clark appears naked and alone on the cover of MassEducation whereas the face on the cover of Kelela’s release is reproduced several times, each instance modelling a different haircut. Enumerating the divergences in approach between the two albums this way, it is easy to give the impression that there is deliberate methodological competition between the two. To imagine a schism between which somewhere lies a perfect set of decisions to reinterpret any given piece of music.

 This is a trick of perspective. While these two albums are particularly discordant in their design, every musical endeavour derives from its creators’ unique context, and every listener’s response is coloured and shaded by theirs. It is only by writing MassEducation and THE REMIXES in direct opposition, or assigning them a numerical value out of ten, or placing them on a year-end list behind 98 other albums that the illusion of competition is conjured. It’s undeniably gratifying to see the art that moved us most recognized and awarded, particularly by tastemakers we respect. On a wider scale however, these accolades become data, sites like Metacritic and AOTY flatten the critical discussion of an album to a discrete number, which is then catalogued alongside every other number. Better, or worse. A single percentage point elucidates whether minimal or maximal worked more successfully. Whether MassEducation or TAKE ME A_PART, THE REMIXES is more valuable.

 As important as the critical response to art is, and useful as data can be, reliance on numerical or adversarial forms of analysis finds individual context and reception at risk of sanding over. In expanse and access, music is more readily available now than at any point in history by some margin, and despite our best efforts, it eludes categorisation by objective value. While it can be overwhelming at times, the likelihood of finding music that speaks directly to our own experience and emotion is higher than ever. The least we can do is enjoy it.    

 -

  [1] And, admittedly, that neither will be found on any top SEO keyword lists for music in January of 2019

[2] https://www.nme.com/reviews/album/st-vincent-masseduction-review https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/st-vincent-masseduction/ https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/oct/15/st-vincent-masseduction-review-annie-clark-accessible-but-challenging

[3] https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/reviews/albums/st-vincent-actor-15181

[4] https://pitchfork.com/news/st-vincent-announces-new-album-a-stripped-down-rework-of-masseduction/?verso=true

[5] My Life and Music, Artur Schnabel, 1961

[6] https://consequenceofsound.net/2018/09/kelela-remix-album-kaytranada-princess-nokia/

[7] Even prior to her first ep, a video from 2012 shows Kelela collaborating with instrumental metal legend Tosin Abasi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baEuKEDw72E

[thesuper17]

On her fourth record, Ariana Grande locates a stylistic intersection within pop where she's not only comfortable, but masterful. sweetener is an album which carefully sidesteps direct reference to the infernal state of the world in 2018, and in the process, cements itself as one of the year's most important releases.

It's easy to approach Grande with a cynical predisposition. A product of the Disney machine, the sceptical listener may consider this impossibly flawless 25 year old an advertisement more than an authentic artist. The cynicism isn't entirely meritless either. 

Grande has been an international A-list celebrity since the age of 17, and embodies an almost idealized version of how a woman 'ought' to look. She can be seen applying makeup in several music videos, and along with a physically unattainable body type for the vast majority of women, it is difficult to think of a better subconscious sales pitch for the beauty industry and the fitness/wellness industry, or a better symbol of Disney's homogenous and sanitized dominion over popular culture.  

And yet. When she speaks, passionate to the point of tears, on mental health, or when she emphatically praises her fans, or when she opens her mouth and that angelic voice pours out, cynicism is rendered petty and dull. Grande is loudly supportive of and incredibly popular within the queer community. It's not uncommon to see fans, boys and girls, plastering Twitter and Tumblr with selfies, vocally expressing both self-love and gratitude towards Grande for helping them find it. 

This too will be observed cynically, a ploy to cast as wide a net as possible and exploit the insecurity of a young fanbase, but ultimately the impact is what matters*. One of the world's most aspirational celebrities actively embraces her marginalised fans and lets them know: you're loved, you matter.   - Enter sweetener, the fourth and most deliberately crafted record of the Floridian's career. More so than any of her output prior, this album reflects back the kaleidoscopic array of influences Grande has absorbed to develop her own unique voice.  It is also an album that feels miraculously unburdened by both the cultural and musical obligations female pop stars are typically subject to.

The overt sensuality that characterised Dangerous Woman placed it within a lineage of releases (see: Stripped, Good Girl Gone Bad), wherein the previously innocent girl proves herself an actively sexual woman. sweetener, while far from being sanitized, nevertheless largely forgoes the explicit in favour of the poetic. 

There is no value judgement (or indeed a clear dividing line) to be drawn between themes of romance and sexuality, but it's gratifying to hear Grande carve out an individual space where she feels free to shrug off pre-determined archetypes. 

This freedom extends to the sound of sweetener. A true A-list pop star, Grande is able to enlist the highest profile of talent in the studio, an advantage she exploits to the fullest, listing production credits from Pharrell Williams, Max Martin and Ilya Salmanzadeh (among others) and performances from Nicki Minaj and Missy Elliott. This affords Grande a stylistic and sonic flexibility that simultaneously presents the album its first major challenge. It’s not enough for Grande to simply demonstrate a wide ranging taste, she needs to convincingly sell sweetener as a cohesive project of her own design, one where she has determined the direction and executed it successfully. And, for the vast majority of the album's runtime, Grande is more than up to the task, an expert vocalist at the top of her game not merely justifying, but necessitating an album of sweetener's length and breadth. 

In a recent interview, Grande stated that while she loves pop, her 'heart and soul is more in R&B', and the addition of Pharrell Williams on production gives her ample opportunity to indulge this aspect of her sound. Early highlight 'R.E.M' is a simple but shimmering track, floating along at a relaxed tempo and layered with gorgeous doo-wop harmonies and backing vocals. The smooth, almost minimalist instrumental marks the first instance of a recurring device on the album in the use of breathing sounds as percussion. This isn’t a brand new idea (Kanye West's 'Black Skinhead' used this trick in 2013), but it's utilized especially deftly here, evoking carefree sensuality without obviously pushing it to the foreground. 

With the exception of a disappointingly phoned-in feature from Missy Elliott, 'borderline' is another stand out. The synths and beats are much fiercer here, with unpredictable and busy hi-hats accompanying the jazz-inflected harmony of the four main chords, repeated throughout. Grande is still comfortably within her range, delivering lines almost in neutral tones, and as the melodies cycle and repeat, they develop a seductive, hypnotic cadence.

Elsewhere, a more traditional pop voice emerges. 'breathin', an obvious successor to Dangerous Woman's bombastic 'Into You', blurs the line between 80s homage and pastiche, complete with a flamboyant synth solo. In a demonstration of Grande's understanding, both of genre conventions and her own strengths, the song's slow build pre-choruses end in a pregnant pause, clearly designed with the powerful and dexterous high runs she's known for in mind. For its final chorus, the deep breath prior to Grande's upper-register lead vocal is even included in the recording, setting up one of the album's most cathartic, fun moments.   

sweetener isn't strictly bifurcated into R&B and pop though. Grande proves herself able to fluidly incorporate forms of those genres and others besides, frequently within the same song. In tradition and lineage, the gospel choir balladry on the enormous hook of 'god is a woman', backed with wide and arpeggiated electric guitar chords, couldn't be further from the pseudo-rapped triplets of its pre-chorus. But somehow, the building pace of the verse collapses into the chorus' held first note in a naturalistic way that never feels stylistically disjointed. Even hints of Grande's time in musical theatre appear on the joyous, sweeping melody of title track 'sweetener' and its bold grand piano accompaniment. The pivot on this track into a trap-style hook is handled less gracefully however, with strange lyrics skirting the edge of comedy.

A sparse few songs across the album feel as though they could have been left out to produce a leaner, more consistent overall project. Regretfully, as the first track proper of the album, 'blazed' disappoints a little. The song is bouncy and fun, and its three-piece of keys, bass and drums builds into a classic Pharrell momentum (bringing to mind 2014's 'Happy'), but this is also the track's weakness. Where, on the remainder of the album, individual facets of Grande’s style are emphasised and supplemented by the production, Pharrell's voice (figuratively and literally) dominates 'blazed' in a way that relegates Grande to a more textural role.

Especially in preceding the excellent 'breathin', 'everytime' is another such track, listenable and enjoyable, but compositionally dry by the standards the album sets elsewhere. Even here though, Grande's aspirational radiance shines through. The track's lead vocal recording is left running after the final chorus and the listener hears her laugh, maybe in the relief of hitting the track's astoundingly high final notes, maybe for any other reason. The laugh is one of many smaller production touches on the album that help to elevate it above more standard fare, but it's also illustrative of sweetener's value as a piece of culture.

  Another easy route to cynicism over Grande (and pop music in general) is the notion she prioritises aesthetics over substance. Aside from being demonstrably incorrect**, the argument is reductionist and binary in a way that obfuscates the actual value of albums like sweetener. Here, aesthetic is substance. This ostensibly carefree, joy-filled music is the product of addressing and reworking real pain, and its promulgation to mass market reminds the audience of something increasingly easy to forget. No matter how bad things get, we can always make them sweet again.

*here your reviewer emphasises the vitality of criticism towards misogynistic standards women are held to, and concedes that Grande is a part of the culture which upholds those standards. Nevertheless, criticism towards Grande the individual on this basis feels much more often representative of a sneering dislike towards girls and the things they enjoy, than a case against the structures behind them.

** the work required to reach Grande's level of proficiency in vocal performance alone, let alone her musicality, composition and choreography far outstrip the, still considerable, effort required to maintain her appearance. although, for that matter, why one is considered so much more valuable than the other, and why women are critiqued so much more viciously in this avenue than men is reflective of structural issues probably outside the scope of an album review no one will ever read

[thesuper17]

As tempting as it is to luxuriate, unconscious, in the hazy summer glow of High as Hope, Florence Welch is, by the end of the record, determined to impress upon the listener the fact she no longer has anything interesting to say.

"And it's hard to write about being happy, 'cause the older I get, I find that happiness is an extremely uneventful subject." 

This line begins 'No Choir', the final song on the new Florence + the Machine album, but it shines an uncomfortably direct spotlight exactly where High as Hope feels most lacking throughout. From another artist, one with a more diffuse appeal, the admission might not be so problematic, Welch's voice is undeniably the centrepiece of F+TM's sound though, guiding the songs not only in melody, but in mood and narrative as well. Without a compelling source of inspiration or conflict, she meanders aimlessly in broad themes, her voice wasted.

And what a voice (concomitant, what a waste) it is: Welch utilises her vocals as an instrument unto itself, providing rhythm, dynamics and infinite subtle variations in tone. Tracks like 'You've got the Love' and 'Cosmic Love' catapulted her to mainstream success on the back of anthemic choruses and thunderous performances, but High as Hope demonstrates her technical and creative control in myriad little moments. Make no mistake, the album features its share of bold refrains, lead single 'Hunger', along with 'Grace' and 'Patricia' showcase Welch's towering belted vocals in huge sustained notes and punchy phrases alike. Here however, the London singer makes plenty of space for quiet as well, in the acapella melody that introduces 'Sky full of Song', and the smouldering piano outro of 'Big God', accompanied by an almost unsettling gurgle. 

On top of taking the lead role, Welch's vocals supplement the album's often sparse instrumentation. Harmonies are employed cleverly and somewhat sparingly, it would be a shame to mask the character of her voice with multiple overdubs across the album, but backing vocals provide a warm textural accompaniment throughout in layered gospel choirs. Where harmonies are mapped directly to the lead melody, they're approached contextually. As she complains 'Jesus Christ it hurts', on 'Big God', Welch is flanked in ghostly falsetto, whereas the sustained notes of 'The End of Love' feature dense and angelic multilayered choral harmonies.

The instrumentation and arrangement on High as Hope is frequently minimal, belying an extensive list of collaborators involved in its production and performance. A significant contingent of these musicians are credited for synth contributions, but the album maintains an organic and often orchestral palette of sound, with piano and percussion providing much of the heavy lifting. Some tracks build with the addition of warm string and horn accompaniments while others like 'Big God' and 'The End of Love' remain skeletal throughout their runtime. All of these decisions are made thoughtfully however, with Welch leading the music, which sinks and rises to match her. Special mention should be made of Kamasi Washington's infrequent but consistently beautiful saxophone embellishments, a very welcome surprise on the otherwise fairly rote arrangements. Vocals and instruments alike are drowned in thick reverb, transporting the listener to some cavernous space. Welch's voice, again the centrepiece of the musical environment, fills the emptiness with power and fervour. From a sonic perspective, the casting of Welch in this singular, almost evangelist role, is perfect: pleasant instrumentals that could run the risk of meandering are corralled and directed under her forceful performance. Regretfully however, Welch offers precious little meaningful substance from the pulpit, calling into question what she's really doing there in the first place.

High as Hope is a summer romance blockbuster*, sweeping the listener along in its pathos, big emotions delivered in universal declaratives. When Welch sings 'I want you so badly but you could be anyone', its easy to believe - no context or detail is invoked during the song and her performance is emotive but aimless. Even on tracks addressing specific people, 'Grace' and 'Patricia', Welch offers up vague second-person encouragement ('you carry us' and 'you've always been my north star'), and soon devolves back to impersonal, almost manipulative writing (the swelling refrain 'it's such a wonderful thing to love' has genuine emotional pull, but is ultimately so broad as to feel cynical). It's perhaps irrelevant or even actively harmful to the experience, to play detective and try to draw out the 'true' meaning of a song or album. On even a slightly closer examination of High as Hope's lyrics though, it becomes obvious that Welch's observation of happiness as an 'extremely uneventful subject' applied to much more than just the album's final song.

On the second track (and lead single), 'Hunger', Welch offers a startling and piercing revelation: 'At 17 I started to starve myself, I thought that love was a kind of emptiness'. Suggesting an exploration of adolescent body image and the real material harm society perpetrates on young women, this song too throws itself open at the chorus. 'We all have a hunger, we all have a hunger', she sings, and while probably right, it feels almost a deliberate reflection. Welch is magnetic, but on High as Hope, she refuses to let the listener anywhere close.  

*[Aside: the reviewer notes upon writing this line that the album relies satisfyingly little on romance as a lyrical theme]

[thesuper17]

On her first solo release since 2012's Lotus, and second run at a comeback album, Christina Aguilera teases an exploration of identity and authenticity with an (ostensibly) fresh-faced cover and bold title: Liberation. Despite the wealth of talent she enlists on this lengthy record though, Aguilera ultimately sounds lost among the various sounds and traditions she borrows from.

It's a strange proposition, to be listening to a new Christina Aguilera album in 2018, and indeed, Liberation does make for a strange experience. Throughout the early and mid-2000s, Aguilera was a ubiquitous figure in the pop landscape, with chart-topping songs across multiple albums. Among fellow Disney alumni Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears, Aguilera was notable for her powerhouse vocals, often showcased in an artifice of 40s' big band and blues styles. Since 06's Back to Basics however, Aguilera's pop star has waned, with both 2010's electro-flavoured Bionic, and 2012's Lotus failing to reassert her as a dominant voice in the genre. For younger fans who began actively listening to pop in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Aguilera might be more recognisable as a judge on the reality television hit, The Voice, completing a symbolic transition from star to venerated mentor.

Even since the relatively recent Lotus in 2012, the global and popular landscape has undergone several revolutions. For the most part though, rather than address the exterior, Liberation is deeply introspective, beginning with a haunting and lush orchestral instrumental, over which Aguilera softly asks herself: 'Where are you? Are you there?' This is followed with a brief acapella rendition of 'How do you solve a problem like Maria' (here titled 'Searching for Maria'). The vocal control and tone on this 25 second cut reminds why, almost 20 years on from her debut album, Aguilera was heralded as an awesome vocal talent to begin with.

As an opening gambit, these tracks hint at some hitherto unrevealed truth from an artist whose career has thus far been marked with carefully manicured aesthetic transformations. The youthful innocence of her self-titled debut gave way to the raw and hypersexual 'Xtina' of Stripped, the kitschy 40s pastiche of Back to Basics transformed to clinical retro-futurism on Bionic. With Liberation, we are to be re-introduced, or perhaps introduced for the first time, to Christina Aguilera as she understands herself.

Michael Jackson's 'Maria (you were the only one)' is sampled at the start of the third track, (also titled 'Maria'). Sampling Jackson here is intelligent and poignant, 'Maria' functions as a sort of retrospective polemic against an industry that commodifies and reshapes its talent to maximise profit, often at the emotional and physical expense of artists themselves. However, this sample begins a troubling trend that crystallises with almost every collaboration Aguilera enlists for the remaining 12 tracks: for an authentic expression of her art and ideals, Liberation leans incredibly heavily on the creative and emotional labour of black artists. 

Michael Jackson's voice eventually gives way to a hard hip-hop beat, (one of two tracks on the album co-produced by Kanye West) allowing Aguilera space to engage her trademark aesthetically gritty, belted vocals. Subtlety has never been Aguilera's strong suite, and Kanye facilitates her beautifully with melodramatic strings and driving percussion. This track and the Anderson Paak. collaboration, 'Sick of Sittin', is where Liberation is at its strongest, taking full advantage of the strength of Aguilera's vocals to match the enormous instrumentals. 'Sick of Sittin' even achieves the impossible in pulling off the 'pretend live band and audience' gimmick without sounding too corny. Even here though, the attempts to match Lemonade in righteous fury are undermined by disappointingly weak lyrics, resulting in the unintentionally hilarious: 'Bitch don't play me I raise kids', and bizarrely tone-deaf: 'It's good pay but it's slavery'.

Liberation features guest spots from Ty Dolla Sign and 2 Chainz on lead single 'Accelerate', Shenseea and Keida on the dancehall reggae-flavoured 'Right Moves' and the aforementioned production credits for Anderson Paak. and Kanye West. A comparison could made with the latter artist: like Kanye, Aguilera draws together a genre-spanning array of proven talent to assist her. Unlike MBDTF however, where Kanye orchestrates his talented but disparate cast into a cohesive whole, each track on Liberation seems to pull Aguilera in a new direction. Much of what results is outside of her expertise and threatens to swallow her whole. While it was certainly a better choice to actually feature Jamaican artists on a track so indebted to dancehall reggae genre conventions as opposed to merely imitating the aesthetic alone, Aguilera's guests on 'Right Moves' simply outshine her verses and contribute to a budding feeling that she isn't at home on her own record.

Where she takes the reins more directly, we are treated to classic down-tempo Christina Aguilera ballads, but the quality of writing remains hit-or-miss at best. 'Fall In Line' with Demi Lovato doesn't add anything new to the feminist discourse in 2018, but it's a righteous song with powerful performances from both women (Lovato being probably one of two or three contemporary pop stars who could convincingly trade verses with Aguilera). The outro of this track is an album highlight, the two vocalists harmonising at the top of their registers and lungs. Others, like 'Twice' and even the sex-anthem 'Pipe', portray a confident, assertive woman who refuses to be infantilized or talked over.

Elsewhere though, a concerning framework for understanding relationships emerges. On 'Deserve' and 'Masochist', Aguilera inextricably links love and suffering, telling her lover 'I say some fucked up shit just to hurt you, but you know I do it all 'cause I love you', and conversely that 'lovin' you is so bad for me, but I just can't walk away'. Pain resulting from love, unrequited, lost or otherwise afflicted, is the basis of a huge amount of art across genres and forms, but lines like this skirt uncomfortably close to justifying and excusing abusive behaviour. Following a period which revealed widespread sexual harassment, manipulation and assault throughout society, these lyrics come across particularly poorly.

There are moments of pure sonic pleasure to be found throughout the album, from 25 seconds of acapella, to Anderson Paak.'s blistering live instrumentation, to the gorgeously warm but achingly sad intro to 'Deserve', and of course, the power and tone of Aguilera's vocals which rarely disappoint. Frustratingly though, for an album professing to reveal the naked truth of its author, Liberation feels blissfully unaware of how utterly indebted it is in its sounds and traditions to the black artists who are relegated to its supporting cast. Unfortunately, even with so much assistance Aguilera struggles to create a coherent through-line that makes sense of all these moving parts, and leaves us with something more lost than liberated.