Reviews

Dua Lipa kick-starts her second album with the line, “you want a timeless song, I wanna change the game.” Seemingly a manifesto for the album ahead, it suggests a mould-breaking album, a complete departure from the pop-sphere and a playground of experimentation. What’s ironic is how far from the truth this opening salvo actually is. On Future Nostalgia, instead of forging a new path, Dua Lipa presents a set of 11 songs which perfect the game instead of changing it. The album is front-to-back pop perfection, not so much a landscape of experimentation but instead one of perfect honing of the 80s revivalisms she emulates; in the process, curating a set of timeless songs she originally chides the listener for wanting.
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At what point does music become lifeless? Could it be commercial pandering? Indeed, one could spend hours reeling off artists whose music has come across as a blatant cash grab. Whose time spent on their music was looked over with the vague haze of dollar signs clouding their vision. The sort of music whose sole purpose is to sell, sell, sell often comes with an aftertaste of lifelessness, a kind of coppery taste.
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Paddy McAloon is a human curio. Sixty-four years of age yet comparatively ancient in outward appearance, he sports long grey hair which melts into a silver beard of equal length. For a photo shoot with the guardian he once sported a cane with a white globe atop it. While this may only be the singular instance of cane wielding one can attribute to McAloon, it’s an image that is seared in my brain; another addition to the aesthetic powerhouse the man is. It would be somewhat trite to call him an elder statesman of pop but with a visage like his, he practically yearns for the honour.
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Muse’s career-defining Origin of Symmetry is one of the few albums that I consider to be a modern masterpiece. Their second outing took their musical status to new heights in regard to scope, quality, creativity and ambition. After investing many hours into this album over the course of 14 years, I still find it astonishing how effortlessly Muse branched out to a vast amount of contrasting genres where they were able to completely reinvent themselves musically. 
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Ever since I came to Vietnam to teach, there was one thing that piqued my interest which was to understand why Korean pop music was so popular in this country. Despite having already been introduced to the South Korean musical giants such as BTS and Blackpink, they still felt incredibly disposable after a few listens. However, there was one solo artist that grabbed my attention among the others. That artist goes by the name of Taeyeon.
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Laurie Anderson’s Big Science is an album that is obsessed with time. Its progression, its regression and its stalling. It fixates on the mundanity of modern life, suffusing it with a sense of dread about what is to come and a sense of anguish that we haven’t traversed too far from our origins. It’s an album that exists in the past, present and future and doesn’t enjoy being in any of those three places at once. Anderson’s simple exclamation of “this is the time, and this is the record of the time” becomes less prosaic and more ‘mosaic’ in its multiple layers. This is the record of the time, it’s the record of all times, but that doesn’t mean it enjoys being there.
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Taylor Swift’s ‘Love Story’ is the best teenage romance song ever written. Nothing will ever capture the grand delusions of young love better than giving the most famous romantic tragedy of all time a happy ending; a love so real it can resurrect Romeo and Juliet. The effect is only heightened by how earnestly 18-year-old Swift seems to believe it. ‘Love Story’ sweeps you up in its whirlwind momentum and soaring choruses, and it’s all built on an impossible fantasy.
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Paul McCartney’s solo career is an unwieldy beast. Spanning half a century, the quality of the ex-Beatle’s music varies wildly across and within albums (or even within individual songs). No albums exemplify Paul’s work outside of the Beatles better than McCartney and McCartney II. Both released at the beginning of a decade and at the end of his time in a chart-conquering band, Paul’s first two solo efforts are bizarre little artefacts that seem to deliberately ignore the fact that he was once in the biggest group in the world. Rough, experimental and a tad unfinished, they’re certainly no Abbey Road, but they are fascinating insights into the artistic process of one of the greatest living songwriters. In hindsight, they’ve also proven surprisingly influential in the world of lo-fi music. I was naturally excited and intrigued then, when Paul announced his return to the series with McCartney III, a new album “Made in Rockdown”, as he has playfully dubbed his COVID-19 isolation.
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There’s a misconception surrounding Róisín Murphy that’s followed her for a number of years now, something that sounds nice when written down but is ultimately a completely empty statement. Critics like to point out the unfair way in which Róisín Murphy hasn’t become a global superstar. Off the back of 2007’s impeccable pop masterpiece Overpowered, many jumped on the bandwagon that this would propel her to deserved universal acknowledgment and acclaim. Whether Overpowered should’ve done so is irrelevant. A truer assessment of Murphy’s career is that she has always been destined to be a cult favourite, always leftfield in some way. Murphy has been on an inexorable path throughout her career; from Moloko’s Statues to 2016’s Take Her Up to Monto, she has been honing a notably uncommercial strain of nu-disco, each release perfecting the previous’ imperfections. Róisín Machine is Murphy incarnate: relentlessly danceable and relentlessly uncommercial and relentlessly her.
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The last couple of releases from American pop superstar Taylor Swift have been patchy to say the least. 2017’s Reputation attempted to lean into all the controversies that had plagued her in the preceding years, but its bombastic edginess too often tripped over itself into absurdity. Then there was last year’s Lover, which should’ve been a glorious return to the buoyant synthpop that made 2014’s 1989 so appealing but a bloated tracklist and some truly dire singles bogged it down. Neither of these albums were without their high points but any glimpse of a return to form ultimately felt suffocated by all of the context, be that the exhausting tabloid drama or the excessive promotional hype.  
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