Charli XCX, dancing at a party that doesn’t exist
By Juan Gallego Benot
Charlie XCX
Brat
Atlantic / Warner
“I love those songs, but they already seem like they’re from another life.” James Young of the electronic music duo Darkstar said this, and is quoted by Mark Fisher in The ghosts of my life. Charli XCX seems to echo this sentiment on a song from her latest album: “Sometimes I wish I could rewind / I wanna go back to another time,” she sings on ‘Rewind.’ It may seem strange that an album at the forefront of commercial sounds should acknowledge its inability to imagine another future. Brat It is an album of 15 songs in a classic format, included in what was once called hyperpop. The formula is simple, appealing and impossible: a succession of influences from club music, a tribute to the late producer Sophie, pop from Anglo-Saxon singers and a nostalgia that does not seek to surpass itself or invent anything new.
The music of brat It’s a fluorescent green, so conscious of its need for innovation that it fails to convince us of its experimental nature, but instead crowds together in an inevitable continuous reinvention. Everything on this album sounds like an invention already known to all. Is it exactly plagiarism? A mix of sounds that we recognise? It is, rather, a pyrrhic battle to overcome a horizon that, for the first time, is so close that we may have crossed it without realising. The frustration is evident (“it took me a long time / to destroy myself / to rebuild myself / to repeat it”, she says in ‘B2b’), and this effort results in a constant pounding against a time that we already consider lost. The idea that time is accelerating is not new, the historian Koselleck said it, and Derrida seconded him when he announced that time was out of joint. Charli assumes all this and does not present a heroic resistance, but something more melancholic, which is the ratification of an end in a loop.
Mark Fisher, again known for his diagnosis of a future that was cancelled, imprisoned and pursued by a past in constant reworking, also said that “the synthesizer no longer connotes an idea of the future” and that “no future is futuristic.” And the false futurism of brat, which cannot generate either rejection or a progressive reception: the album captures a future that will always be behind us.
Perhaps this is the album’s greatest brilliance: its ability to repeat the word back more than 30 times in a single song. The other day they played it at a party. And we danced to it, yes, but there was something in that music that rejected the dance itself. It’s not a specific rejection of binary rhythms, but the feeling that this music was more appropriate in yesterday’s disco, or the day before yesterday. A friend said: “I don’t have the body for this.” And it’s not because we’re getting old, because young people, who are increasingly avoiding discos, reacted the same way we did. It’s because, in some way, this music requires a party that doesn’t exist, located in a place in some possible future to which we are not invited.
John Grant, All the Things That Hurt
By Laura Fernandez
John Grant
The Art of The Lie
Bella Union / PIAS
Arborescent and unpredictable, deliciously precious. At times dark, in a profound and transformative way, as in the percussive ‘Marbles’, a confession that looks like a poem. beat. John Grant, the former frontman of The Czars, the guy who moved to Iceland, the musician who talks to himself when he writes, majestically twists and amplifies the formula of his sound on his sixth album, an ambitious, story-driven work. And the way he does it is thrilling. Pure exploration of an evocative, tortured, powerful and magnetic self. Take, for example, ‘Father’, where he not only apologizes to his father – whom he wishes he could hug again – for not having been the kind of man he expected him to be, but because the soundscape Grant draws is almost a mental space, which declines itself and enters into some kind of other world where things hurt and the sweetest synth pop that envelops him elevates the journey to a small classic. Family reflection also reigns in ‘Mother and Son’, the song that contains a redemptive and heavenly chorus, and that heals itself, in seven long minutes, in which it tells the story of Allen R. Schindler Jr., the marine who was murdered for being homosexual in 1992.
The tone of the album is that of songs that are small, almost cinematic worlds, which give way to one another in a balanced synchronicity, in a certain sense magical – as magical and Martian as ‘Laura Lou’ is, in which almost everything is voice. There is the spoken word, and the evil laughter, the riffs synthesized from ‘Meek AF’, the funky playful and eighties-like ‘All that School for Nothing’, and the epic in a very sad calm of ‘Daddy’. All are nuances and colors in an album that exudes melancholy and a furious new wave filled with memories of a tortuous childhood (‘Zeitgeist’) that has grown within Grant to transform into something incomparably beautiful.
The darker side of Megan Thee Stallion
By Beatriz G. Aranda
Megan Thee Stallion
Megan
Hot Girl / Warner
With three albums in less than a decade, the Texas rapper has earned a place in the history of popular music. She has accumulated Grammy awards, millions of listens on Spotify and, without her, the representation of women in hip hop would no longer make sense. In her personal life, however, at 29 years old she already feels defeated. There is no way out. Megan direct mention of the shooting with Tory Lanez, but a general lack of loyalty. Far from the empowering euphoria of his alliance with Beyoncé in that extraordinary Savage Remix (2020), in 2024 he shows his darker side. “How can someone so blessed want to cut their wrists?” he sings in ‘Cobra’. He changes tone, but his style, full of extraordinarily direct words and no obsession with pop melody, remains intact.
The infallibility of a great Richard Thompson
By Fernando Neira
Richard Thompson
Ship to Shore
New West
We might object to the cover, more appropriate for a monographic album of traditional sea songs, but Richard Thompson has been claiming almost papal infallibility for decades. The great patriarch of the folk rock British (Fairport Convention, Richard & Linda Thompson) resumes the speech at 75 years old where he left off with 13 Rivers (2018) and encapsulates their specialties: from the most muscular rock (‘Turnstile Casanova’) to the sing-along folk (‘Singapore Sadie’) or troubadour (‘The Old Pack Mule’), the nostalgic modulations (‘Life’s a Bloody Show’) or those medium rhythms that, in the case of ‘Lost in the Crowd’, caress the memory of their classic ‘Wall of Death’. And almost at the end, the imposing ‘What’s Left to Lose’, pure acidity and vitriol with the best guitar riffs of the lot. Huge.
Featherweight, Mexican and experimental
By Fernando Navarro
Featherweight
Exodus
Double P
Accused of making an apology for drug trafficking and under threat of cancellation, Peso Pluma is doing his thing: he continues to position himself as a global star. His fourth album is his most ambitious. The king of the corrido tumbado understands the disco format as a concept to show his universe. This double-titled album Exodus, continuation of the previous one Genesis, shows two faces in 24 songs and many collaborations. The first is very Mexican, its main feature, with more effusive winds than ever to describe more scenes of drug traffickers (drugs, sex, violence, outlaws) in songs like ‘La People II’, ‘Hollywood’ or ‘Vino tinto’ (with a quote from Pablo Escobar). The second is more experimental, flirting with English, rhythm and blues modern and club culture. He wants it all to stay at the top of pop.
Vetusta Morla, committed to its time
By Carlos Marcos
Ancient Morla
Extras
Little Somersault
Almost by surprise and in the middle of a tour, Vetusta Morla has released its sixth album. The unusual way of proceeding could make one think that it is a transitional work, perhaps with songs discarded from other albums. Far from it. First of all, it should be noted that this is the album where the vocalist, Pucho, shines the most, displaying a stimulating range of tones, turns and emotions. The lyrics, often accused of being labyrinthine, are more crystalline here. We can use both schools, but in the latter the message comes across more directly. Texts that focus on the social, analyzing the world we have to live in, often unsympathetic. It is difficult to find a Spanish group so committed to its time: a clear example is the song that closes the album, DronesMusically, they continue to investigate, playing with sounds and finding attractive formulas.
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