Doing this weekly music post thing has encouraged me to seek out more new music, which is good, but is a problem when a record comes along that requires more than a week to really get to grips with. Such a record is Róisín Murphy’s new album Take Her up to Monto, one of the strangest records I’ve heard in quite some time. That strangeness doesn’t prevent it from being very definitely a Róisín Murphy record, quite the contrary; it’s like every strange edge of her previous records but concentrated and expanded upon, until you’re left with an album which feels like the culmination of a trajectory Murphy has always been on, in which lounge and deep house finally become interchangeable. Read more↴
New Britney! I was a bit wrongfooted because I assumed she’d come back with a banger, so I wasn’t sure what to make of this more downtempo track. I quite like it; actually, I like the verses and the bridge quite a lot (a new role for Britney to play: power-bottom-ney), but there’s something about the shift to a more obviously uplifting chorus that feels a bit cheap? The guest rap is garbage, obviously, and its presence is inexplicable (who on Earth thinks “I wasn’t going to listen to this Britney record, but now I know G-Eazy is going to be on it…”?). Read more↴
I like Reign. I like how the show is early-modern Gossip Girl, flagrantly unconcerned with history except as a stage for teen jealousies and romances. I like how everyone wears pretty dresses. And I especially like the Very Serious face that Adelaide Kane, as Mary Queen of Scots, pulls whenever she has to make a Morally Difficult Decision. There’s an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Faith, the evil vampire slayer, swaps bodies with Buffy, and Faith (in Buffy’s body) practices her impression of Buffy by looking sternly into a mirror and saying, “You can’t do that, it’s wrong.” I think of this exaggerated performance of tough virtue every time I watch Reign. Read more↴
With brides, angelic visitations, and ghosts, Bat for Lashes’s The Bride seems to be aiming at the territory of gothic romance (as does the tendency of the lyrics to use romantic commonplaces like “this heart of mine,” which is arguably appropriate, but which I found distracting). But if the gothic is always about the body, the music on The Bride suggests something else: early morning, shafts of light through curtains, and a delicacy that makes me want to use words like “transcendent” or “ethereal.” Read more↴
The new Demi Lovato track is great. I hope the sadboy R&B tendency (Nick Jonas, Zayn Malik) are taking notes on how you should make moody, sexy, records. Read more↴
