Lorde - Pure Heroine
Review:
In the current pop firmament, Lorde is a black hole. That's the message you get from the defiantly low-concept video for her single "Tennis Court", in which the 16 year-old New Zealand singer-songwriter (real name: Ella Yelich-O'Connor) stares right at youΓÇöher taunting, onyx pupils burning a hole through the computer screenΓÇöfor a hypnotic and somewhat uncomfortable three and a half minutes. (It's an anti-video in the tradition of the Replacements' "Bastards of Young", and, fittingly, her moody cover of "Swingin Party" has been making the rounds.) In a moment when too many new artists seem afraid to offend or go off script, Lorde is an exciting contradiction: an aspiring pop star who's had a major-label development deal since age 12 (she was discovered at a local talent show) but has retained a seemingly genuine iconoclastic streak. The other day she spoke too truthfully in an interview and accidentally insulted Taylor Swift; Katy Perry asked her to tour with her andΓÇöpolitely but firmlyΓÇöshe said no. With the global smash "Royals" (the first song in 17 years by a female solo artist to top BillboardΓÇÖs alternative chart) she made her name by sneering at everything else on the radio ("We don't care/ We aren't caught up in your love affair"). The message is clear: Lorde has introduced herself to the world as someone who gives very few fucks. Twenty seconds into her debut album, Pure Heroine, she's already announced that she's bored. Twice.
Lorde's voice occasionally takes the form of a wide-eyed, Feist-y coo, but much more often it's a low, clenched growl; like everything else about her, it has an air of "wise beyond her years." "I didn't start writing songs until I was 13," she said in a recent interview, almost apologetically, but then quickly accounted for the lost time, "Before that, I wrote short fiction." Now that she's a wizened 16, Lorde, who wrote all the lyrics on Pure Heroine and co-wrote the music, has fashioned herself a correspondent on the front lines of elegantly wasted post-digital youth culture and working-class suburban boredom. Her songs capture the drama and debauched regality of being a teenager: their subjects include online gossip, empty bottles, queen bees, and young people who already feel old. "I'm kinda older than I was when I rebelled without a care," she sings with a languid sigh on the bleacher-stomping single "Team". Or is she saying "revelled"? It's hard to tell the two words apart, and maybe that's the point.
That carefully cultivated ambiguity is precisely what makes Pure Heroine work. "Royals" walks the line between rebelling against and reveling in the trappings of power, luxury, and excess of contemporary pop. The arrangement is economicalΓÇöjust a few finger snaps and a barely-there beat caught in the gravitational pull of Lorde's charismaΓÇöbut overall, "Royals" gets to have it both ways. Lorde says she wrote it thinking of how she and her friends would listen to A$AP Rocky rapping about couture while they rummaged through a particular friends' well-stocked kitchen, too broke (or too lazy) to spend money on dinner. And thatΓÇÖs a crucial subtlety: "Royals" doesn't critique hip-hop culture so much as express a disconnect that many of the people who love it (Lorde included: "I've always listened to a lot of rap") feel when listening to songs about luxury culture. Whether she's singing about her schoolyard peers or the world's most famous pop stars (who, as she admits on "Tennis Court", have just become her new peers) Lorde achieves a tricky balancing act of exposing irony and even hypocrisy without coming off as preachy or moralistic, simply becauseΓÇöthanks to Pure Heroine's constant use of the royal "we"ΓÇöshe's usually implicating herself in the very contradictions she's exposing.
More fully realized than her debut EP The Love Club, Pure Heroine is a fluid collection of throbbing, moody, menacingly anesthetized pop that sometimes sounds like St. VincentΓÇÖs "Champagne Year" mixed into whateverΓÇÖs in the punch at Abel TesfayeΓÇÖs house. Still, a lot of its best production ideas and lyrical motifs repeat in such a way that it sometimes feels like youΓÇÖre listening to 10 versions of the same song. Current single "Team" has a memorable chorus, but most of its lyrics ("I'm kinda over being told to throw my hands up in the air"; "We live in cities you never see on screen/ Not very pretty but we sure know how to run things") feel like scrapped lines from the "Royals" session. "Glory and Gore", too, rehashes the same bloody/regal/teen imagery, but its greater crime is the way Lorde overstuffs the verses with so many words that it weighs down the melody. And yet, thereΓÇÖs something endearing about Pure HeroineΓÇÖs more unfiltered impulsesΓÇöthough sheΓÇÖs had a record contract nearly a quarter of her life, you get the sense Lorde is still being given a lot of room to breathe and hone her own particular songwriting voice. These tracks all feel like they were written by a very precocious teenager, and thatΓÇÖs a big part of their charm.
Pure Heroine is a decidedly post-internet album. Some of that has to do with its genre-agnostic blend of influences (in her live show Lorde has been covering both Kanye West and the Replacements, and her music is being marketed to a generation of people who in no way find that weird), but itΓÇÖs mostly a comment on a certain kind of sensibility of self-presentation in the characters it deftly depicts. "ItΓÇÖs a new art form, showing people how little we care," she boasts on "Tennis Court". As the song goes on, though, cracks in the facade begin to show. "We're so happy even when we're smiling out of fear,ΓÇ¥ she admits, but at least ΓÇ£it looks alright in the pictures."
WhatΓÇÖs fueling Pure Heroine is a tension between the tweet and the truth, the cumulative effect of the little digital fictions we craft for ourselves daily. But "Ribs" is the best song that this very promising songwriter has written so far becauseΓÇöeven at the risk of seeming uncoolΓÇö it gradually allows the walls to crumble. "It feels so crazy, getting old," she sighs at the beginning, in a smoky pantomime of maturity and detachmentΓÇösort of like a sepia-toned Instagram filter applied to her voice. Soon, though, the beat ramps up and the song turns into an impressionistic swirl of memories: "The drink you spilled all over me/ 'LoverΓÇÖs Spit' left on repeat." She gets so caught up in the feeling that she lets herself blurt something truly vulnerable: "I've never felt more alone/ It feels so scary, getting old." LordeΓÇÖs music is quietly wise to a particular modern irony: Beneath every #DGAF thereΓÇÖs a person who secretly gives a fuck about something, and behind every anti-pop song thereΓÇÖs a singer whoΓÇöjust like everybody elseΓÇöknows what itΓÇÖs like to feel happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time.
By Lindsay Zoladz (7.3/10)
Track List:
01.Tennis Court (3:19)
02.400 Lux (3:54)
03.Royals (3:10)
04.Ribs (4:19)
05.Buzzcut Season (4:07)
06.Team (3:13)
07.Glory And Gore (3:32)
08.Still Sane (3:08)
09.White Teeth Teens (3:38)
10.A World Alone (4:54)
Summary:
Country: New Zealand
Genre: Indie
Styles: Pop
Media Report:
Source : CD
Format : FLAC
Format/Info : Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : ~800-900 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 44.1 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
