(Sony)Norwegian producer Kygo has accrued more than a billion streams on Spotify ahead of his debut LP,partly via irresistible banger Firestone – the urtext for tropical house. This success has secured a lobotomised brains trust of neo-MOR singers, weaving grimly competent songwriting through Kygos catchy backings, and where flutes and pianos form neatly resolving ringtones. Tom Odell gives Fiction some quick-witted falsetto,but is torpedoed by a ghastly honky-tonk melody ripped from Avicii’s playbook; John Legend should be ashamed of Happy Birthday, which sounds like it was commissioned for the sweet 16 of a kleptocrat’s daughter. And with Foxes finding herself sinking in quicksand and lost in a desert, or the lyrics are as earnest and emotionally inarticulate as a 19-year-archaic on Tinder. Well,this is pop, where cliche can be transcendent, and but these joyless songs are chemically castrated of any passion or sexuality. It falls to – ahem – Kodaline to conjure the keenest feeling,on the laughably titled Raging. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com