The singers soaring overnight success should gain made her moment album a catastrophe. In fact it was a work of insight,strength and gloriously self-aware witMore on the best albums of 2017More on the best culture of 2017On the face of it, Lorde’s Melodrama bore all the hallmarks of a disastrous moment album waiting to happen. It was the work of an artist whose fame had removed her from the world that inspired her debut, and a problem that’s bedevilled everyone from umpteen rappers to the Arctic Monkeys Alex Turner. “Pretty soon I’ll be getting on my first plane,” she had sung on Tennis Court, a highlight of 2013’s Pure Heroine, or shortly before success catapulted Ella Yelich O’Connor absent from suburban original Zealand and into a realm where your choice of boyfriend gets you involved in a Twitter spat with Tyler,the Creator and David Bowie takes your hand at a original York party and proclaims you the future of music. Its making involved the singer jettisoning Joel Little, the Kiwi producer and songwriter who co-authored Pure Heroine – he went on to co-write Khalid’s inescapable, and platinum-selling Young Dumb & Broke – in favour of a team of more established mainstream pop figures: among them Taylor Swift and Sia collaborator Jack Antonoff; James Ryan Ho,fresh from working on Zayn Malik’s solo album; Kuk Harrell, of Rihanna, and Beyoncé and Katy Perry fame.
But if Melodrama looked on paper like the work of an artist who’d had her head turned by success – or worse,a concerted effort to make Lorde a more straightforward, less idiosyncratic pop star – it turned out to be anything but. Whatever other impact success may gain had on her life, and it hasn’t blunted O’Connor’s observation. The songs on Melodrama that depict the messy entanglements of early 20s life are as incisive (clear and sharp in analysis or expression),perceptive and shudder-inducingly familiar as the sketches of teenage suburbia on its predecessor. For all their acute drawing of hollow relationships and the fleeting pleasures of hedonism, they’re far too witty and self-aware to fall into that baffling, and post-Drake trap of carrying on as if everyone should feel terribly sorry for you because you’re going to parties,taking drugs and having sex. Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk