Word of the Day
Galvanize (v., GAL-van-eyes)
To spur someone into action, to shock them, or to coat metal with zinc so it won't rust.
Gif of the Day
DogsSealsDockOff! Off! Off!Exit stage leftSealdog?
Link of the Day
Lorde - Melodrama
I've wanted to write up this album for six months and never felt quite up to the task. Perhaps the best way I can describe it is that it's like watching someone simultaneously experience something, tell you how it feels, and critique their experience at the same time, all brilliantly. It's not really fair that Lorde can do this so easily when it's so hard to communicate what makes her art great.
Super-producer Max Martin once described Lorde's music as "incorrect songwriting": it doesn't play by the normal rules, but it works incredibly well. It's both high art and mainstream pop, without being entirely comfortable in either. There's gaps where you'd expect flow, rhythms that stop and start on a whim, phrasing over the barline, whatever. If the song needs it, Lorde adds it. As Neil McCormack nailed it, "Her distinctive melodic style and hip hop rhythmic flow actually risks getting a bit dully repetitive if the content was not so strong and the arrangements so carefully fashioned and consistently surprising."
The title of the album is the best summary: melodrama. Lorde is telling us exactly what is on the album with a sly understanding and humor beyond her years. Like early adulthood, Melodrama is a mess of things, brilliant, jagged, layered, complete. To quote Stacey Anderson, "when she sways alone in “Liability,” wondering if she’s too complicated to find love, it is heartrending and uncomfortably relatable. But the album is no saccharine journal entry by any means. Her party has pills, dresses rumpled on the floor, no absence of profanity, and a sense of humor, too: the moxie it takes to not only acknowledge your extravagant emotional contortions, but wink at them drolly by calling the whole thing a Melodrama."
Melodrama may not be your cup of tea. It's not entirely ours either, but it's the album from 2017 we've returned to, chewed on, and marveled at the most. And she's 20. Stupidly talented people are the worst.
MusicLordeMelodramaWink wink nudge nudgeDown the back. But who cares. Still the Louvre.Buy a vowel?