Month: July 2019

Lukas Graham were a Danish Soul-Pop band (named after their frontman, Lukas Graham Forchammer), falling more or less within the Adult Alternative genre umbrella, who had a handful of hits from their second album on the U.S. charts in 2016. From a content perspective, they were clearly aiming for the same niche as Twenty One Pilots had with their album Blurryface the year before. However, while Twenty One Pilots favored a kind of light Rap-Rock sound, Lukas Graham’s musical idiom was most heavily influenced by classic-era Motown acts such as the Miracles and the Temptations.

This self-titled release was originally their second album in their native Denmark, and was later adapted into their first international release, with a few songs dropped and a couple of interpolations from their first album included. This album has its flaws (we’ll get to them), but at its best, it contains some of the finest Adult Alternative music of the decade. Eight of the tracks are absolutely amazing, with a rich Motown-esque Soul sound and a depth of introspection and profundity that Twenty One Pilots never even approached.

The lead single, “7 Years”, got some backlash after a prominent internet critic with an irrational hatred for Adult Alternative called it the worst song of 2016, and a number of impressionable internet idiots took his pronouncement as the gospel truth. In reality, it is very probably the best hit song of that year (its only real competition for that title coming from Adele’s “When We Were Young”, another introspective retro-Soul track). The backlash it received can be in large part chalked up to the fact that the band’s frontman is white, Danish, and looks absolutely nothing like most people’s mental picture of a Soul singer, so the fact that he pulled off this sound so flawlessly threw a wrench into many people’s compartmentalized view of the role of ethnicity in music.

Other high points include the scorching “Take the World by Storm”, the glowing “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout Me”, and the bittersweet “Happy Home”. Particularly poignant is “Better Than Yourself (Criminal Mind Pt. 2)”, which relates the story of a real-life friend of Forchammer’s who wound up behind bars. The singer acknowledges that he knows his friend is guilty, but still loves and misses him and believes he is ultimately a good person. Less relevant to the album’s overall point is the breakup ballad “What Happened to Perfect”, but its melody is so exquisitely beautiful that it’s hard to complain.

The album dwells heavily on the then-recent death of Forchammer’s father, which is discussed most directly in the heartbreaking “You’re Not There”. And while Twenty One Pilots’ Blurryface never really came to any resolution at the end, this album does, with “Funeral”, the singer’s exhortation to the people at his own wake to celebrate his life. This is a man who is satisfied with his life and who ultimately has no regrets, which is frankly a much more satisfying way to close out an album that the unresolved angst expressed at the end of Blurryface.

That said, the backlash this album got is not entirely undeserved. This album is a study in extremes: Its best moments scale sublime heights, but it also contains five of the worst songs I’ve ever heard on a Pop album.

It doesn’t help that the incredibly annoying “Mama Said” and the idiotic “Strip No More” were both released as singles. The former sounds like the most grating Jackson 5 pastiche imaginable, with its shrill vocals and infuriatingly perky melody. The latter is the narrative of a self-involved idiot who has convinced himself that a stripper is in love with him, and then acts betrayed when she leaves her job.

“Drunk in the Morning” (one of the aforementioned interpolations from their first album) isn’t much better. It’s possible to write sympathetic songs about calling someone in the middle of the night to ask for sex (look at Lady Antebellum’s classic “Need You Now”, for example), but this smug, self-satisfied gloat isn’t how you do it.

The two songs exclusive to the Danish version of this album are arguably even worse. “Hayo” is one of the most asinine songs of the decade (its message is essentially “Your girlfriend is a slut that’s cheating on you, and by the way I think that’s hilarious”). Meanwhile, “Playtime” is perhaps the most laughably unconvincing attempt at a sex song since the early Justin Bieber singles: at least with “Strip No More”, you could make a case that the band is somewhat aware of what an idiot the protagonist is, but no such hint of self-awareness is visible here.

Still, as wildly uneven as it is, this is nonetheless one of the most important albums of 2016, an immensely ambitious achievement that, say what you will about it, had a massive impact on almost everyone who listened to it. The fact that even the bad songs are spectacularly bad is, in its own way, just another tribute to the album’s level of ambition and intensity. In any case, in spite of its occasional clinkers, I can still unreservedly recommend this album to almost anyone…the sublime tracks more than make up for the bad ones, and it’s just such an obviously important album that anyone who has any interest in modern Pop music whatsoever should really hear it.

This album has received an absurd amount of negative press, mostly from amateur internet critics, but while it does unquestionably have its flaws, I chalk most of that up to the grudge that half the internet seems to have against Meghan Trainor. As far as I can tell, this grudge all boils down to her having released “Dear Future Husband”, which, while not an especially bad song, featured a somewhat old-fashioned view of romantic relationships which sent the online political correctness fanatics into an insane frenzy and which they haven’t forgiven her for to this day. And as we know from the example of Robin Thicke and the “Blurred Lines” controversy, the political correctness types are very good at either brainwashing or browbeating the internet into enthusiastically supporting even their silliest vendettas.

But enough politics…you’re here to read about the album itself. Here, Trainor casts off the authentic retro-Doo-Wop that had been her trademark before in favor of an equally authentic late-Nineties Pop sound. If this album is inferior to her first (and to be perfectly honest, it is), it’s probably because the thing she’s imitating here is simply not as good a field of music as the thing she was imitating then. That said, her achievement in capturing the desired sound is just as uncanny as ever, and if, as seems likely as this point, she becomes one of those artists who take on an entirely different musical idiom for each new album, I’m more than okay with that.

Really, the album’s main problem boils down to a very misguided choice of sequencing, because when you get right down to it, there are only two truly terrible songs on this album. The first is the painful brag rap “Watch Me Do”, wherein Trainor proclaims that she’s “got nice curves/nice breastesses” (I won’t venture to disagree with your thesis, Meghan, but did you have to phrase it that way? That particular made-up word already sounded asinine when Jay-Z used it, and it sounds even worse coming from you). The second one is “Me Too”, which features awful instrumentation straight out of a bad late-career Jason Derulo single (think “Wiggle” or “Get Ugly”), and a repetitive spoken sample that is annoying on about twenty different levels at once.

That said, the rest of the album is mostly decent-to-good, and these songs might have been blessedly lost in the shuffle if the record’s producers hadn’t decided to make them the first two tracks on the album. The prior bias against Trainor notwithstanding, I can almost understand people hearing those first two tracks and deciding they’re going to hate the album right then and there.

The third track, the album’s lead single “No”, is a perfect demonstration of Trainor’s powers of pastiche, an uncanny imitation of a late-Nineties Pop-R&B kiss-off single that might have been recorded by someone like Destiny’s Child. Granted, it isn’t the best track on the album, mostly because the style it captures so flawlessly is one that hasn’t really aged all that well, so the song is ultimately more an impressive feat of pastiche than a great Pop song. Still, you have to respect the skill it must have taken to capture that era’s sound with such uncanny accuracy.

The album’s highlights are “I Love Me”, a collaboration with beloved up-and-coming Rapper Lunchmoney Lewis, and “Champagne Problems”, a tongue-in-cheek, self-mocking twist on the ‘first world problems’ meme; even Trainor’s biggest detractors have proven largely unable to resist those two tracks. But there’s plenty of other strong material here…the truth is that most of this album is actually pretty solid. “Hopeless Romantic” and “Kindly Calm Me Down” are very fine ballads, the former even coming close to her best hit, “Like I’m Gonna Lose You”, in both sound and quality. “Dance Like Yo Daddy” is a highly enjoyable dance jam with some endearingly goofy lyrics, and “Mom”, co-written by Trainor’s younger brother and dedicated to their mother (who actually appears on the song) is beyond adorable. The title track is a collaboration with Reggae fusion duo R. City; it has a similar sound and theme to their earlier hit “Locked Away”, and is of comparably fine quality.

Granted, not all the material is this good. The other Reggae-influenced track on the album, “Better”, is dragged down by an uninspired guest verse by Yo Gotti, though until that verse comes in it’s actually rather striking. The ‘Girl Power’ anthem “Woman Up” is fun but still pretty obvious, and the dreary “Just a Friend To You” and the tepid “I Won’t Let You Down” don’t really offer much of interest (the former actually resembles the, er, title track of Trainor’s first album Title, only with the air of a resigned doormat in place of that song’s feisty defiance).

Still, apart from the first two tracks, nothing else on the album reaches the level of the truly awful, and the good tracks ultimately outnumber the bad. I will admit this album does come as something of a disappointment…it’s certainly not as good as her debut, and being frontloaded with its two worst tracks probably hasn’t help its case much (especially since those tracks wound up being the first promotional single and the second full single, respectively). But while Thank You is ultimately merely good rather than great, it’s certainly not the fiasco than Trainor’s detractors are trying to pretend it is, and if you like her work (as much of the general public does, despite what the critics try to claim), then for all its flaws, it’s actually well worth checking out. Just remember to skip the first two tracks, and you’ll be fine.

Lady Gaga’s brief reign as the Queen of mainstream Pop music came to an end over the course of 2011 for two reasons. One was that Adele showed up that year and immediately made her look like a poser. The other was the quality of her work that year. I don’t know how much of her actual target market listened to entire albums at all at the time, but I have to believe that her fall from the top was at least partly a judgment of artistic karma for making this album.

Lady Gaga was never remotely the genius her followers touted her as at the time, but her first album, The Fame, did contain quite a bit of good material, and her second release, The Fame Monster EP, was actually one of the best mainstream albums of 2009. This trainwreck, however, was completely unworthy of what talent she did have, and the fact that it was one of the best-selling albums of 2011 thanks to her pre-existing stature at the time is still one of the more embarrassing memories from an otherwise excellent year in music. And even after all these years, this is still easily Lady Gaga’s worst album…even her disappointing ‘comeback’ album, Artpop, was at least more competent than this.

Admittedly, this record does contain a handful of gems. The Steinman-esque Rock anthem “The Edge of Glory” and the Pop-Country pastiche “You and I” are two of Lady Gaga’s all-time classics, and the House Music-influenced “Marry the Night”, the wildly intense “Hair” and the Latin-flavored “Americano” also hold up well. But the rest of the album is a ghastly mess of cliched songwriting and unlistenable overproduction. And frankly, apart from perhaps “The Edge of Glory”, even the good songs don’t entirely escape the album’s pervasive production issues.

The production on Lady Gaga’s first two albums, by unsung genius RedOne, made the material seem better than it really was, but the production on this album is absolutely horrible, reaching near-Skrillex levels of migraine-inducing static. There are also a couple of extremely ill-advised attempts at a Heavy Metal sound here (like the aptly named “Heavy Metal Lover”), which have all the power and sophistication of Limp Bizkit on an off day.

The songwriting is better than the production, but not by much. This album was evidently intended to be some kind of love letter to Pop music in general, with varying attempts at pastiche of every variety of Pop music in history. Unfortunately, like all of Lady Gaga’s work (at least in her Pop era), it didn’t have the substance or talent to fulfill its supposed ambition, coming off instead as derivative and scattershot. At times she even seems to be copying herself…for example, “Judas” is just a blatant retread of earlier Lady Gaga songs like “Bad Romance” and “Monster”, only with all the qualities that made those songs interesting removed. Also, I can’t be the only person to notice that the chorus to “Highway Unicorn (Road to Love)” is just the hook from “Poker Face” with different lyrics.

The lyrics are even worse, loaded with clichés and incredibly cheesy but also painfully earnest and self-important, clearly believing they’re articulating profound truths with lines like “I’m a nerd/I chew gum and smoke in your face/I’m absurd”. “Bad Kids” is one of the most generic attempts at a youth rebellion anthem I’ve ever heard, which is no mean feat. “Scheiss” is clearly trying to be Rammstein, with its faux-German nonsense-word chorus, but without that band’s Heavy Metal intensity, it never manages to capture the campy thrill of the original, coming off more as straightforwardly embarrassing.

“Government Hooker” apparently managed to get Lady Gaga in actual trouble with the government, but it’s just another in a long line of controversy-baiting cries for attention, using a lot of shocking buzzwords without ever actually saying anything. At least when Green Day did this kind of thing, they set it to music intense enough to obscure their lack of real content (of course, it also helped quite a bit that said music was actually listenable).

There are also tons of self-consciously positive messages spread throughout this album, which are apparently supposed to make up for the quality of the actual music. Hell, it seems to have worked, at least so far as the title-song is concerned…it became extremely popular for a few years because people felt its message was important, despite the fact that virtually no-one seems to like it as a song. Not only is it a blatant plagiarism in both melody and subject matter of Madonna’s much better song “Express Yourself”, but it is hopelessly cheesy in lyrics and delivery and features the worst case of overproduction on the entire album.

“Black Jesus + Amen Fashion” is even more ridiculous. I can see how the concept sounds progressive in theory, but any attempt at meaningful content is ruined by moronic jokes like “Jesus is the new black”. The result is not only inane, but also insufferably pretentious, which is something of a perennial problem for this album as a whole. It’s like the progressive movement’s gospel according to Paris Hilton.

Of course, judging from the singles alone, many Pop listeners may not have been aware of what a travesty this record was, since most of the very worst material never made it onto the charts. Still, this thing did set sales records as an album, so I think it still probably had a major role in destroying (or at the very least, vastly diminishing) Lady Gaga’s career as a mainstream Pop singer.

This has actually had some positive side-effects, since the quality of her work significantly improved after she stopped trying to regain her old stature as a Pop star and settled into making things like standards albums and socially-conscious Oscar Bait songs and drawing her influences from Classic Rock and Country. Indeed, I imagine we can also indirectly thank this album for a lot of the positive developments in Pop music around that time, given that it helped kill the Club Boom of 09-10, making room for more interesting material to enter the mainstream consciousness. Still, five good songs are not enough to make this a good album, at least when the rest of the material is this appalling, and despite its short-term commercial success, this ranks as one of the spectacular career-destroying disasters of the decade, arguably on a par with Miley Cyrus’ Bangerz.

Now, like everyone who’s even tangentially aware of the internet music criticism scene, I had heard the abundant rumors that this album was an abomination. I had never quite believed them before, partly because I quite enjoyed the album’s lead single, the Fleetwood Mac-esque “West Coast”, and partly because many of the critics who thought this also hated her first album, Born to Die. Besides, the professional critics didn’t seem to have any particular problem with it, several even putting it on their “Best Albums of 2014” ranking, and while the published critics have their blind spots too, I tend to trust their judgment more often than that of the amateur crowd.

Now, for the record, I consider Born to Die to be a modern masterpiece, and one of the finest albums of 2012. But having now listened to the entirety of her follow-up album…yeah, this is just as awful as everyone says.

Remember, Lana Del Rey’s music is in the Baroque Pop style, like Tori Amos or Arcade Fire, and that style absolutely requires flowing, fairly traditional melody for it to work. Well, her first album had that kind of melody in spades, but apart from the deceptively decent lead single, there’s hardly a single tune on this whole album.

“Sad Girls” sounds like one of the saddest attempts at jazz singing I’ve ever heard, while “Cruel World”, “Guns and Roses” and “Florida Kilos” manage just enough melody to be intensely annoying. Granted, “Brooklyn Baby” does have a pretty tune, but unfortunately, it’s the tune of “Summertime Sadness” off her first album (seriously, the melodies are almost identical). By the end of the album, these non-tunes blend together into exactly the kind of musical wallpaper Del Rey’s detractors have always accused her of making. And the final track, “Is This Happiness?”, is wimpy enough to come off as an anticlimax even after this album.

On top of the dreary, tuneless music, the lyrics on this album are terrible. At best, they’re clumsy and uninspired, with none of the biting pith of the lyrics on her first record. At worst, they’re idiotic and unutterably simple-minded (“I’m a sad girl/I’m a sad girl/I’m a sad girl/I’m a sad girl/I’m a bad girl/I’m a bad girl”, for example, or “All those special times I spent with you, my love/They don’t mean shit compared to all your drugs”). , There’s even a song literally called “I Fucked My Way To the Top”—I’m pretty sure that’s meant to be a sarcastic statement, but that doesn’t make it any less stupid as a song lyric.

The most uncomfortable moment on the album is unquestionably the title-song, built around a word coined by the movie A Clockwork Orange to describe extremely brutal sexual violence; it also references the infamous Phil Spector composition “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)”. I gather Del Rey has been through some unpleasant experiences in her life, but this song isn’t creepy in the dramatically effective kind of way…it’s just unpleasant and kind of sickening.

Like I said, I still considered Born to Die one of the finest Indie Pop crossover albums of the decade, but after hearing this garbage, I suddenly understand much more clearly why there are people who don’t like Lana Del Rey as a musician. Fortunately, her next two albums, Honeymoon and Lust for Life, seem to represent a return to form, with all the melody and lyrical wit that seemed to be lacking on this record. Still, I can’t say the internet critics were wrong when they dubbed this one of the worst albums of the current decade, and it’s actually quite hard to believe that the woman who made Born to Die could go so far downhill in the space of one album.

This album opens with a spoken message, saying that it is best listened to “At night, and alone”. And indeed, that is exactly the overall atmosphere of the album…a private, pensive look into the psyche of a gifted songwriter with a fascinating story to tell.

This album is probably more famous for the hit dance remix of its lead single, “I Took a Pill in Ibiza”, than for anything on the album proper. This remix did work surprisingly well, but while it conveys quiet despair with a kind of Plastic Soul feel, the original is more philosophical and ultimately sounds at peace with its sad narrative of a lonely, forgotten one-hit wonder. It is the album’s opening track, and serves as a kind of microcosm for the album as a whole, which is mostly devoted to fleshing out the themes alluded to in “Ibiza”…the romantic loneliness, the bittersweet and fleeting nature of worldly success, and the quiet, philosophical acceptance. The latter in conveyed on the two most beautiful songs on the album, “Be As You Are” and the closing track “Buried in Detroit”, both of which are easily on the same level of beauty and depth as the best actual hit song of 2016, Lukas Graham’s “7 Years”.

The album has been jeered by certain amateur critics for its acoustic Folk-Pop sound (the lower grades of internet critics have a certain reflexive bias against anything played on an acoustic guitar), but it doesn’t really sound much like the usual targets of this group such as John Mayer or Jason Mraz. Posner himself, with his usual charming self-effacement, described the album’s sound as his “trying to make Country music and failing”. What the result actually sounds most like is Baroque Indie Folk, the kind of music made by such bands as Bon Iver, the Decemberists, or Iron and Wine. Only two songs diverge heavily from this sound…the haunting “Only God Knows”, which sounds almost like a throwback to Woody Guthrie, and the blistering Blues-Rocker “Jade”.

Posner himself comes across as immensely charming here. He’s always projected the persona of a humble, down-to-earth everyman; that was a liability early in his career, because at that point he was trying to market himself as a Pop-R&B showbiz personality in the vein of Trey Songz or Taio Cruz, and his persona was laughably inappropriate for that pose. But what was unsuitable for his early efforts proved ideal for a confessional singer-songwriter, and this album shows him to his absolute best advantage. He does indulge in a little boasting of his power on the penultimate track “(I know how to write) One Hell of a Song”, but by that point, he’s earned it. Even Posner’s singing here is the best it’s ever been: he was never a great vocalist, but the bizarre vocal stylings he attempted on his first album (which he describes as his attempt to “sing Hip-Hop”) convinced most of the public that he was a far worse singer than he actually is, and his vocals here, while a little thin in places, are actually quite pretty most of the time.

It’s worth noting that while most of the public had forgotten Posner’s existence between his hit “Cooler Than Me” in 2010 and the success of “I Took a Pill in Ibiza” in 2016, he had actually carried on a thriving career as a behind-the-scenes songwriter in the meantime, as he details on “One Hell of a Song”. The best of his efforts in that vein was the sublime “Beneath Your Beautiful”, a UK Number One hit for British singer Labrinth. Perhaps to repay Posner for writing one of the best songs of the decade for him, Labrinth joins Posner here for the biting “Silence” in the only featured credit on the album proper.

As fine and indeed nearly flawless as the original album is, the deluxe edition does mar its perfection somewhat with a string of ill-advised dance remixes. Granted, the “Ibiza” remix had worked, but it made a certain kind of sense, given that it was already about the pain beneath the mask of the Pop star. The other remixes just come off as out-of-place and unnatural, and do nothing but make the original songs much less interesting. The remix of “Buried in Detroit” does feature a surprisingly good guest verse by Big Sean, but it still doesn’t even approach the impact of the original.

Still, this is easily one of the best albums of 2016…which is saying more than those who only follow the Hot 100 would know, since 2016 was one of those years with a wealth of great Pop albums that was not really reflected by the singles charts. I might even go so far as to call this the best Folk album of its year, since that is what it is at heart…old-school confessional Singer-Songwriter Folk, telling the story of one man’s personal journey with understated music and heartfelt, intelligent lyrics. It’s a classic of a high order, and while Posner’s follow-up to it, Mansionz (a collaboration with his former songwriter partner Blackbear), unfortunately dove straight back into the “singing Hip-Hop” approach that made his first album such a joke, Posner has still established enough clear songwriting talent by now that I’m certain we haven’t seen the last of him yet.