Kontextmaschine

28th August 2015

Post reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 105 notes

Whoever told me “the new Carly Rae Jepsen album is a lot better than you’d expect”, you were correct.
Whoever told me “the new Carly Rae Jepsen album is actually really good”, you were incorrect.

Like the first few songs sound like they could be on Top 40, yet were better than anything I remember when I was listening to Top 40 last week.

The album starts out banging as fuck. Run Away With Me is a great song. It doesn’t blaze any trails, but the footsteps in follows in are like, Annie, Tegan and Sara, CHVRCHES and happycore vocal anthems, a touch of that laser-wireframe Trapper Keeper ‘80s neo-neon-noir shit we’re about lately, all of which are EXTREMELY my jam.

The next two are solid - the title track puts some bouncy ‘90s anime BGM instrumentation over what are by all rights (and are delivered as) Jackson 5 lyrics, I Really Like You is simple as hell and fun as hell, with some instrumentation from back when they discovered synthesizers and polyrhythm at the same time and went wild.

But from there, eh, it gets grim and tryhard real quick, and the things it’s imitating start to get even more painfully obvious. Boy Problems is a Victorious Breakup Song (like WANEGBT) done as ersatz Lucky-era Daft Punk but the lyrics are way too on the nose, the one good memorable line is awkwardly deployed.

Sonically, Your Type rips CHVRCHES waaaaaay too hard and too directly, and lyrically it’s clear someone sat down to write A Friendzone Song in exactly the same sense you’d sit down to write A Book Report About The Giver

The rest of the album… there are some good bits, but half of them I’m like “man I wish this bit was in a better song” and the other half I’m like “man I remember when this bit was in a better song”.

The one thing I’ll say, compared to the other big ‘80s-throwback pop album of the year, Taylor Swift’s 1989, it draws on the dancier, more disco-influenced, diva-y and tbh gayer stuff of the period, and there’s a few tracks on here that are disposable trash as is but would make great fodder for club dance remixes.

Tagged: carly rae jepsen review canadian content