Mad scientist of pop
Charli XCX Charli Warner
CHARLI XCX could easily have turned in a safe, hit-heavy popdance album this year. But where’s the fun in that?
If Jack White is the mad scientist of rock, Charli XCX is the one for pop, a peripatetic mixologist and collaborator who seems happiest pushing the boundaries of what a three-minute song can do. She wonderfully doesn’t colour within the lines.
The fascinating 15-track Charli has the artiste looking back with fondness (1999), peering into the future (2099) and at her intimate present (February 2017). It can’t even be contained in one language – French, Portuguese and Korean are heard.
Reunited with longtime producer A.G. Cook, her collaborators this time include Lizzo, Christine and the Queens, HAIM, Troye Sivan, Brooke Candy, Cupcakke, Big Freedia, Sky Ferreira, Clairo and Yaeji.
Charli XCX, born Charlotte Aitchison, already achieved pure pop perfection in the past with Boom Clap and Fancy and simply replicating that seems to bore her.
Of course, she does offer some typically addictive pop tracks with Cross You Out and a subdued Warm. She’s even resurrected an old song – Track 10 – cleaned it up, added the incomparable Lizzo and offered it anew as Blame It On Your Love.
The standout 1999, a warmly nostalgic, Britney Spears-ish look at key pop culture icons of the ‘90s, is helped plenty by Sivan hysterically crushing on Jonathan Taylor
Thomas. But the coolest parts of the album are when Charli XCX goes to the next level, like on Click and Shake It, which aren’t really songs as much as they are robots stuck in a blender and left in a monsoon.
Charli XCX has heard the future and has bookended her album with it. The first song – Next Level Charli – is either just one long chorus or lacks one, a signal of what may happen in this Spotify era. And the last song – 2099, with Sivan again – is a glorious, anarchic idea at what pop will sound like in 80 years.
We just hope Charli XCX will be around then, pushing it ever forward. – Mark Kennedy/AP
Gruff Rhys
Pang!
Rough Trade Records
PANG! is another adventurous chapter in Gruff Rhys’ fertile and eclectic and solo career, a collection based on mostly acoustic performances but transformed through “radical remixes” by South African producer Muzi. And it’s sung in Welsh.
Pang! is as different from the orchestral pop on last year’s Babelsberg as that album was from its predecessors, but as with Rhys’ Super Furry Animals, the changes never feel random or desperate and convey integrity amid the risks.
Totaling less than 30 minutes, there’s ample variety among the nine songs, with sonic echoes of Spain, Brazil, Africa, church music from the High Middle Ages and 1960s folk.
Assisted by former Flaming Lips drummer Kliph Scurlock, one-man horn section Gavin Fitzjohn and N’famady Kouyate on balafon, a West African xylophone, Rhys and Muzi give each song its own distinct character.
Bae Bae Bae uses word repetition akin to Taylor Swift on Shake It Off to express a universal message of hope amid environmental and social calamity – radioactivity and fluorescent algae, woes and rows, but also sweet breezes, beautiful melodies and change.
The telegraphic Ara Deg (Ddaw’r Awen) includes lines in Zulu and muses about inspiration “coming your way, slowly but surely” while Niwl o Anwiredd has a repetitive clacking that just avoids disrupting some lyrical trumpet lines.
Exquisite closer Anedd I’m Danedd translates into A Dwelling For My Teeth and sounds like Don Quixote ruminating astride his faithful steed – “What is an ear?/ But the brain’s chimney ... And what is seeing?/but searching for answers” – as a brass section celebrates the antihero, but follows him at a safe distance.
Over before you know it, Pang! is a tuneful gem of a music box recommended to all, Welsh speakers or not. – Pablo Gorondi/AP
The Lumineers
III
Dualtone Music Group
FILMS, movies, television, books: They all tell stories that allow audiences to see glimpses of themselves. The Lumineers have told their own story in III, a 10-track concept album composed of three chapters that follows the fictitious Sparks family.
The tale is grounded. While the story follows the destructive path of addiction as it enters the life of matriarch Gloria in Chapter I, the struggle faced by the family is one recognizable to anyone who’s had a loved one deal with addiction or has faced it themselves.
It’s also a narrative that writers Wesley Schultz and Jeremiah Fraites know intimately. Schultz has a homeless relative who has battled mental illness and addiction and Fraites’ brother passed away after a heroin overdose.
Lyrically, The Lumineers use searing imagery, painting a picture with each song. This picture – the life of Gloria, her son Jimmy and her grandson, Junior – is even further illuminated by the heartbreaking short film that accompanies the record.
All in all, the breadth of the project is remarkable. The stunning visual vignettes bring lines to life, such as when Schultz sings, “A little boy was born in February/ You couldn’t sober up to hold a baby” and you watch Gloria fall, clutching her wine glass, with the baby playing on the floor close by.
The songs stand on their own. Removed from the context of the rest of the album, Life In The City is just that – a narrative of navigating a difficult and lonely city life. But within the larger story, it is part of Gloria’s battle, as the city entices her with drugs, alcohol and sex.
For their third album, The Lumineers employ their typical sound with piano and the gruff vocals of Schultz pushing to the front. The tracks are not overly produced, giving a raw, emotive feel to each song.
The storyline itself, has moments of hopefulness, but it also makes no promises. While there seems a chance that Junior may escape the cycle of addiction from the generations before him in Left For Denver, the ending of the short film is ambiguous, questioning if he does get away.
It’s an appropriate ending, as it mirrors the reality of addiction. There is always a chance that the cycle will end, but to put a pretty little bow around the narrative would be an injustice to the subject. The Lumineers bring moments of hope, but they recognise the lingering darkness of addiction. – Ragan Clark/AP