Taking the High Road
With her new album, Kesha makes a welcome return to party-girl form
In this, the moment of proper justice that is #Metoo and #Timesup, it is hard considering Kesha — in her past, the walking embodiment of a cross between a beer bong and a disco ball — without thinking about the headlines, heartache and hassles she went through for the better part of the last decade.
Then again, since 2014, and the start of her suit against producer and label head Lukasz (Dr. Luke) Gottwald for alleged sexual assault, abuse and battery, it’s been hard to hear Kesha, period.
After appealing for freedom from her recording contract, the courts rejected requests to terminate her Kemosabe/sony label deal. Kesha couldn’t sing for her so-called abuser, but she couldn’t leave.
There was no longer joy to being the woman with the $ in her name, or party-balling pride in being the girl who brushed her teeth with Jack Daniels.
She was frozen, as if the all of the fun, frolic and rough dancepop vibes had been yanked out of her.
When she finally did record, on Kemosabe in 2017, Kesha dropped an album, Rainbow, that not only played upon musical themes of freedom — sounds she claimed Dr. Luke would never allow such as husky rock, country and gospel-inspired melodies — but abuse, trauma and its after-effects.
If Rainbow, then, was the tremulous tone of Kesha in a funky fugue state, her newly released High Road is the sound of reclamation and abandon, of finding her form and shedding old skin, of locating exactly where the party’s at in 2020, then tearing apart the dance floor with a pickaxe and a tough, glam-pop-hop roar.
High Road returns Kesha, confidently, to the mix of sleazy glitter-pop, Edm-tinged bangers and swirling balladry of her first two albums but with the benefit of age, experience, genuine relief and some real polish behind her words and melodies.
Starting with the torrid pop of Tonight and the club-rap catcall to feel everything she’s going through, a gravelly sounding Kesha announces that High Road
will be a trashy, furry and emotional trip she’ll have no reason to slow or stop. If you follow the album it’s as if she’s penned a cranked-up diary she’ll more than likely burn after reading.
All the while, her voice, whether rapping, singing or both at once, crackles with drama, swoons with sensual aplomb, and curls from all the snipes she’s planning.
When she hits upon the trap-rapping pop of My Own Dance, Kesha snidely refers to herself as a “tragedy” on top of being a “party girl,” while allowing herself a que-sera-sera moment with lyrics such as “Woke up this morning feeling myself / Hungover as hell like 2012” and the whack-reflective “I get it, that you been through a lot of s--- / But life’s a b---, so come and shake your t--s.”
Kesha continues her funny frankness on the clomping R&B anthem Honey by recalling a ride-or-die proximity and a shoulder-to-cry-on sweetness with the friend who’s the subject of the song before reminding the subject of her newly found scorn that she’s broken “the girl code ... the golden rule.”
Kesha has been through too much to start being forgiving now.
She continues the confessional with Father Daughter Dance, where she yearns for the childhood she missed out on by not having a dad around, and closes High Road with a shout-out to her grandmom and the spirit of “gypsy blood” that runs through her family in Chasing Thunder. The latter, a stomping, churchy acoustic number ripe with the thrill of psychic victory, is as if her previous album, Rainbow, was given a shot of adrenalin and the empowerment of risk. It’s a mighty moment.
Variety