Charli XCX

aka the awful song with Brooke Candy made me nervous but I even don't mind that in the context of the album and You (Ha Ha Ha) is actually better than I remembered and the rest of it is great. The first three singles are still the best stuff here especially Nuclear Seasons but this is a pretty wonderful pop album.

as extravagant as charli's overload of stylistic reference points is, i don't think it's what's preventing this clicking for me - basically just don't think her songwriting is quite there yet. it's a bit overstuffed but the problem is less that and more her lack of a really distinct songwriting voice

or just, interesting words, or something

i think i'm the only person in the world that doesn't hate the brooke candy song. the second-to-last one "how can i" would be the dud if i had to pick one

You're not alone. Cloud Aura is one of her best. That said, True Romance is a let-down for me largely due to the production. My favorite track is What I Like, but even it has it's problems. Like why start of with a great intro that gets you all hyped up, only to never reference it anywhere else in the song? Still love it, but that's just one example of the many opportunities missed by this album. I expected it to be much more in the vein of Dance 4 U and Velvet Dreaming but the album's first half is like a 90's rehash of what Little Boots was doing with 80's pop.

I've been cool on her other singles but "What I Like" is marvelous.

this is awesome; the two-year-old songs thread in pretty seamlessly

weird but so far i prefer the album tracks to most of the singles (except "what i like" which wow). "like roses" and "take my hand" especially

black roses*

Really, really, really good record.

after seeing her live last week this album is finally seriously beginning to click for me

in a way i'm glad the singles never quite did it in isolation because i get to feel the rush of "YOU'RE JUST ELECTRIC BLUE" now instead

CUZ I CAN TASTE YOUR LIPS ON MY LIPS
YOUR KISSES TAKE ME OUT OF CONTROL
AND I CAN FEEL MY BLOOOOOOOOD
IT'S CRAWLING THROUGH MY VEEEEEEIIIIIIIINS

somewhere, shirley manson feels proud

brooke candy's rap on "cloud aura" is so so bad but the rest of it is so good

WHY YOU WANNA GO TO SLEEP
DON'T GO TO SLEEP
DON'T GO TO SLEEP
LET'S GO OUUUUUT

hmmm i gave this album a couple spins last week but i only actually liked about half of it (mostly the front half, but some later too), the rest just became this amorphous blur of whatever

it's taken me about a month and about...8 or 9 plays, i guess, to click

YOU'RE JUST ELECTRIC BLUUUUUUE is wonderful. all of this is wonderful.

except for brooke candy

Is "cloud aura" the same as on last year's mixtape?

yeah no changes as far as i can tell

"set me free" is ENORMOUS and shoulda been the lead-off single instead of "you"

I still don't get why "I Love It" didn't get the praise this is getting, I know it's noisy and brash but that's kinda the point?

This keeps getting better on repeated listens, it's not so much that it's a grower as

something else that I was thinking of how to explain before I hit enter, oops. It's like it's really simple but sticks way more than the disposable pop she clearly adores.

I love that mixtape so much but "Cloud Aura" wouldn't be the tune I'd carry over from it.

i never heard the mixtape - how does it compare to the album tim?

"i love it" is just completely rotten imo

I haven't heard the album so I can't compare - but the mixtape is shimmering cloud-R&B which by that description should be awful but actually is excellent - "Cloud Aura" is pretty indicative of the overall sound but there's some more discoid and/or balladic stuff on there and there's no other raps.

There are some songs down the end of Super Ultra that could have slotted in fine, on here but for the most part the album is much stronger, which of course it was always going to be given that it has all those pre-release singles on it.

I'm a big fan of "I Love It" (which has had plenty of praise, btw - perhaps not on ILX but certainly elsewhere), but it's not something that would gel with the rest of this record at all; too daphne & celeste / bananarama. it's pummelling, brash, throw-your-hands-up-in-the-air-sometimes sort of stuff; none of the songs on true romance even remotely approach that kind of aggression.

and yes there is a stray comma in that first sentence, oops

Yeah, "I Love It" would sound totally out of place on this but I think it's strange that there's so much dislike for it on its own.

"i love it" did really well on the ilm poll despite not being overwhelmingly praised here (and met with boos and hisses during the results rollout)

yeah i'd be interested to learn what is quite so rotten about "i love it" - as was mentioned upthread, obviously it's loud and obnoxious - but that's the whole purpose of the track, to convey that feeling of just not giving a fuck

I don't _love_ it as much anymore, but I like it in the same way I like Shampoo. And it's not like Icona Pop didn't sound more or less like this for years, so it's not like they "sold out" or whatever accusation you want to level.

at any rate this album is amazing. and yes, "Set Me Free" is massive but it doesn't seem to be the direction Charli XCX wants to go with her singles. alas.

(incidentally, the "Set Me Free" producer's best known for working with _Meds_-era Placebo, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Nicola Roberts and Sohodolls, which is as good a triangulation [uh, with "tri-" replaced with "quad-" as necessary] of this album as you'll find anywhere.)

"i love it" feels clumsy and contrived and, crucially, totally unfun to me. i like don't-give-a-fuck music but it just repels me.

(katherine - picking up something i half-saw on twitter last night if i may, which is prob relevant here - your dislike of "tumblr" as a signifier. i'd say tumblr - regardless of the pockets of tumblr where this isn't the case - signifies decontextualisation above all to me, whether that's endless images/quotes plucked from the ether or the social justice kids or whatever...)

oh, and GREAT review btw

http://www.mtvhive.com/2013/04/23/charli-xcx-true-romance/

haha, that was actually prompted by reading a bunch of metacritic reviews of this very album. the thing is... tumblr is a huge site, with a huge and varied userbase; it's like how people say designs "look like Geocities," as if a site with millions of uses could be somehow aesthetically consistent in a way that isn't "this is how entry-level HTML from cookbooks in 1999 is probably gonna look."

my beef I think is that a lot of time it gets invoked as a kind of shorthand to sneak in pejoratives. like, if someone is trying to say that "this charli xcx album sounds like a thing teenage girls would love," then they should just say it -- and then think about why this is such an important thing to mention. or "this charli xcx album sounds trendy" -- how? why is that bad? etc.

(also, thanks!)

Ugh not feeling this at all, there's an underlying clumsiness to almost everything here and she's just not an enjoyable or engaging on-record presence. Awful voice too.

Agreed, and I even like some of her mixtape material. I just can't with this unfinished-sounding album.

Love it!!!

She covers 'I want it that way': http://www.popjustice.com/briefing/believe-when-we-say-we-like-it-this-way/114844/

every time i listen to this, the one with brooke candy is the only one that stands out to me

but then again it is the blatant 90s r&b homage so

the album really turns around after that track, i think. "what i like" and "black roses" are also very good.

i find myself rooting for her because she seems really likable but there's something gloopy about this record that i find a bit impenetrable. it's like listening to pop while having a head cold.

haha isn't that kinda the idea of tumblr-pop in the first place?

Supa Ultra was more consistently R&B-influenced IMO (and also led off with "Cloud Aura"). Their quality seems about the same to me.

well then that must be why i don't listen to a lot of tumblr-pop

i guess i mostly like pop to be bright and snappy and confident

idk i feel like she doesn't really put herself out there? i don't get a sense of vulnerability, it feels too hedged to me.

"Take My Hand" is by far my favorite of the singles. What a banger.

Agreed.

J0rdan you're not wrong, I just think it's amusing how the vaunted appeal and point of distinction of this music is also the thing likely to leave many pop listeners a bit cold. But the same point's probably been made many times upthread.

i find myself rooting for her because she seems really likable but there's something gloopy about this record that i find a bit impenetrable.

i wish she wasn't so likable tbh, or so eager to be liked - i feel like she's a really interesting voice and artist but there's a major label sheen, an eagerness to be pop, that doesn't sit quite right. like, i don't feel we should be judging this as "pop" at all - did we ever judge pj harvey or björk as "pop"? even though they were basically mainstream figures - but it's the album's doing that it positions itself like that.

maybe some people will parse it as contrived but i get a real sense of vulnerability from "set me free" and "grins"

or maybe not so much vulnerability but at the very least her performances on those songs feel like she is having an ~emotional breakthrough~

waitwaitwait. how are "set me free" and "you're the one" NOT vulnerable? like, you can level all manner of accusations at them but "not vulnerable enough" is just fucking bizarre. (or "hedged" for that matter -- I mean I can't think of a single emotional stop that isn't pulled out.)

FWIW I don't see her as anything close to pj harvey or bjork and I highly doubt she's aiming for that, so it seems like a non-sequitur. she's far more '80s than '90s. like, you should be looking to mall-pop and freestyle, not alt-rock.

Remix albums are always fabulous

the 1975 track sounds like a 1975 Brief Inquiry/Notes-era album/interlude track (complimentary)

pretty much everything on this is a success which is way better than usual for this sort of thing

my only complaint is that the 1975/jon hopkins track doesn't really fit with the rest, it's too much its own thing

Glad this isn’t just features on every song like Guess and that most of these are complete remakes.

the 365 remix w/shygirl is what I'm looking for

the bon iver one is gorgeous. some of these are really emotionally affecting! the “everything is romantic” one really like establishes the original as a whole cinematic universe, caroline did an incredible job with that

i don’t think the remix album is better than the original but it may be better at nailing the thing she is doing right now where she is writing in extremely diaristic fashion about fame in a way that manages to eliminate the wall between celebrity artist and listener. the way this version of “i think it about it all the time” spells out the exact specifics of her personal life and career hitting a crossroads as her fame peaks in her 30s couldn’t be more individual to her, but it’s rendered in such a tender and universal way (for me)

I came here just to post about what a delightful shock it was to hear Bonnie Raitt's "Nick of Time" interpolated into the Bon Iver remix.

“I think about it all the time” is my favorite song in both the original and the remix album. It feels like two very different approaches and can’t decide which one I like better.

remix album is astoundingly good—might be the best remix album ever? helps that the original album is packed to the brim with iconic hooks and lyrics

also is that what caroline polachek’s music sounds like? ive heard a few songs but didn’t remember it being anything like that. her singing on this is wild

She does some pretty impressive vocal gymnastics on her last album.

I love Caroline Polachek and shygirl and those tracks are among my favorites on this. But it's pretty great throughout. Agree about the "Nick of Time" nod.

Calling it now that her next album will be called "Brat but it's my next album"

"BRAT But It's Totally Different Because It's All New Songs But I'm Still a BRAT who the fuck are you"

the sympathy is a knife remix is my early favorite but i wish the 'it's a knife' lyric was cooler.. i was immediately over it on first listen and now i dwell on it. would rather find & replace with 'it sucks when' but maybe i just need to get over it!

over it over it over it over it (to the tune of bumpin that obvs)

“Apple” didn’t strike me as a highlight the first time and it turns out it’s the most popular song in the non-remix album. It’s so insanely catchy I don’t know how I missed it. Album is so packed.

All the features on the remix album also seem very ilm-approved so this is obviously going to be aoty 2024 in here.

That's just due to the tiktok dance though, right?

yes

Doing double duty on SNL next month!