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Here are the album reviews I wrote for the January issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo on Christmas Day.

Product
-Sophie (Numbers/Beat)
Communion
-Years & Years (Interscope/Universal)
Pop music continues to evolve despite isolated gripes about how it’s all the same forms only rejiggered from a technological aspect. If you compare what’s different between chart hits that came before the turn of the century and after you do notice a marked change in vocal styles and sonic textures, and both definitely have something to do with technology but only in that new equipment and software make them possible. Someone still had to have the idea to use them to these ends. Sophie, the pop music art project of British producer Samuel Long, substantializes this theory. The title of Long’s first mini-album, a collection of singles already released, refers frankly to one obvious use of pop music, and, reportedly, he’s already sold some of these tracks to companies like McDonald’s, which may or may not support the idea that this is “future” pop music but definitely indicates that it has a place in commerce. What’s typical about Long’s music is its circumscribed qualities. As with most electro-pop nowadays, percussion is merely suggested, and while there are occasionally vocal-led melodies for the most part the pleasure these tracks evoke is abstract. Long purposely makes his textures as electronic-sounding as possible, and even the singing, often delivered via a highly processed female avatar made to sound very juvenile, smacks of artificiality. This remains the old-fashioned view of the future, but even if Sophie sounds extreme as pop it carries with it feelings that are recognizable. What it mainly lacks is the potential for something more. Even the closing track, “Just Like We Never Said Goodbye,” clearly the most memorable pop song on the album, feels constrained by its idea. You know it will never break out of its delineated set of sounds. Who would have thought that the future of pop would be to collapse in on itself? Years & Years, a more conventional post-millennial electro-pop group, trades in the same constricted sonics, which are produced by two guys, Mark Ralph and Two-Inch Punch. The singing, however, is done by actor Olly Alexander, who copies the high melisma of fellow Brits like Sam Smith, a style that owes a lot to Jeff Buckley except that Jeff Buckley would have never allowed his vocals to be tweaked this much. Communion, the trio’s debut album, opens with a slow number, as if to establish Alexander’s seriousness as an artist, and only later offers up dance tracks that nevertheless only go so far as club bangers. This is pop music with a mission to tease your brain, though the melodies lack that visceral appeal we want from pop, and therein may lie the difference. Y&Y understands that the most basic quality of pop is repetition, which is necessary to create earworms, and electro-pop succeeds or fails on the strength of its hooks. Pop music without hooks sounds like a contradiction in terms. Welcome to the new world. Continue reading →