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Pop artist Harry Styles
Photo: Lillie Eiger
Album of the week:
Even the beginning is outrageous: "Music For A Sushi Restaurant" opens Harry Styles' third album with a slapped funk bass that goes straight to the pit of your stomach, accompanied by a chorus of shrill "Baaaah-ba-baaaah" as if you were ended up on The Muppet Show, where this crazy studio band with the beautiful name Dr.
Teeth And The Electric Mayhem merrily plays along, accompanied by the singing lupins and watermelons from the »Garden Song«.
Styles fantasizes about green eyes and fried rice, apparently sitting across from a loved one and imagining him frying a fried egg on her hot skin: »Green eyes, fried rice/ I could cook an egg on you«.
Uh yeah
But it rarely comes to the extreme in »Harry's House«, already in the opening piece he is content with »just a taste«, later, in »Little Freak«, he ponders another flirt and states in a gentlemanly manner: »You never saw my birthmark «.
That alone is a remarkable line in a pop song.
Of course, just about everything that concerns Harry Styles is remarkable.
The 28-year-old from the British town of Redditch is perhaps the most valid male pop star at the moment, a contemporary sex symbol without a macho attitude, a fashion-loving foodie with sunny boy charm who likes to date older women and is the first solo man to be on the cover of » Vogue« managed.
His biggest hit was also a delicious cheek, a summery song about getting sugary after slurping a juicy melon, sex and drug innuendos not excluded: "Watermelon Sugar."
When one has reached that status of inviolability, the music almost doesn't matter.
"Harry's House" is a bombastic chart success, every single one of the new Styles songs, produced by Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson excellently between retro and modern, is good for a hit and becomes a meme on TikTok and by the countless teen fans a meticulous, breathless be subjected to textual exegesis.
It doesn't matter what the criticism writes or complains about.
If there was something to complain about.
But the beauty of Harry Styles is that not only does he understand music, he also knows how to use it to disarm critics.
"Harry's House" is a homage to the Japanese pop classic "Hosono House" by Haruomi Hosono, who in 1973 wanted to sound like popular US rockers like The Band or James Taylor.
Just knowing this cult oddity is a clou that Styles deliberately spread, you don't trust someone who once became famous in a boy band (One Direction) to do that.
With his third, mature, but at the same time compellingly relaxed album, he should finally leave this origin behind in the shallows, just as Robbie Williams and Justin Timberlake did before him.
Where his debut five years ago still wanted too much and »Fine Line« 2019 too little,
»Harry's House« strikes the right balance between precise songwriting and casual chatter about girlfriends, for whom he sometimes plays the ardent, longing lover (»Cinema«) and sometimes the advisory caretaker (»Matilda«).
That's right
It's not deep
at all, but fans will enjoy deciphering clues as to who might mean what in real life.
Styles used to date Taylor Swift, from her he knows how to put gossip bombs.
Of course, "Harry's House" also pays homage to Joni Mitchell's "Harry's House / Centerpiece" from her 1975 album The Hissing of Summer Lawns, which in turn includes a tribute to jazz trumpeter Harry "Sweets" Edison.
As you can see, the interior of Styles' pad may be upside down on the cover, but the singer-songwriter keeps his pop references in strict order.
Joni Mitchell recently tweeted to Harry, "I like the title," which is meant to be understood as an accolade from the queen of the music era Harry Styles adores most.
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Harry Styles
Harry's House
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Stevie Nicks, Paul McCartney and songwriter prankster Harry Nilsson are also among his avowed role models – and all of these influences can be found on the album, along with plenty of yacht rock, eighties soul and funk: the ballad »Boyfriends« remembers with a picked guitar on McCartney's "Blackbird" or Simon And Garfunkel, "Cinema" sounds like the Commodores of the "Nightshift" era, "Daydreaming" like Earth, Wind & Fire, "Daylight" like Steely Dan's "Haitian Divorce" - and those Single "As It Was" is ultimately a brazen, over-the-top copy of the a-ha world hit "Take On Me."
But free.
The youngest Styles followers don't know any of this anyway - or are discovering it for the first time through him.
Not bad either.
"You know it's not the same as it was," Styles sings in this first hit from his new album.
That's right, nothing is as it was: instead of sweet and sticky watermelon juice, Styles now serves good, expensive vintage »Grapejuice« from Laurel Canyon for dinner: »A bottle of rouge, just me and you«.
You can hardly refuse such an invitation.
(8.0)
Listened briefly:
Finna – »soft core«
One of the myths about the rap genre is that it's a one-on-one business.
Hip-hop history is full of tough guys who rhymed their way from precarious circumstances to fame.
But what if you're not a guy and don't want to or can't be tough?
The Hamburg rapper Finna has now released her first album »Zartcore«: »Make the rap soft and tender again / feel feelings and get on with it«, she formulates her gentle but confident mission: The lyrics of the 31- year-olds about psychological problems, self-doubt, body positivity.
In the electro-pop ballad »Mudda«, the queer mother of a nine-year-old daughter addresses her conflict with the role that society dictates to her: »Dress me sexy, even behind the pram/ Why should I only wear Birkenstocks now?«.
Finna is proud
to have gone her own way: "Hey, I did it myself, screwed it up myself, managed it myself," she defies in "DIY," a punk abbreviation for "do it yourself."
When she first started making music, the young singer who grew up in Ahrensburg didn't feel like macho-dominated rap until a friend introduced her to feminist hip-hop artists like Sookee.
In 2015 she won a young talent award with her first single "Musik ist Politik", but a mental illness soon put her out of action for several years.
She put on weight and, like her US colleague Lizzo, resists seeing this fullness as a problem with happily emphasized physicality in angry tracks like »Overscheiß«.
Not without humor: "I'm fat in Hamburg City!!!
« she posted euphorically on Instagram at the beginning of the week for a huge poster of her album in the Hanseatic city.
Finna is also a networker in the queer-feminist collective Fe*male Treasure, so that female rappers no longer have to fight their way through alone.
"I'm emo, but I fight," she raps on her late, powerful debut.
(7.7)
Porridge Radio – »Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky«
Don't lump her silly-titled band Porridge Radio in the mixing bowl with today's post-punk acts, says singer Dana Margolin, but rather with nu-metal or emo bands that are just as "cringe" as she is.
If you listen to her third album, you know what she means: Margolin's nasally pressed vocals, always scratching on the verge of crying, chattering teeth and wailing, her self-reproaches formulated right in the face, how desperate, jealous, frustrated or just in every relationship is bad, tug at the patient's nerves.
The band plays increasingly anthemic, guitar-ridden indie rock that is so uninnovative that you could call it dull, which then fits the lyrics again.
Because of course Margolin rages against everything dull, apathy,
the loneliness, the soliloquies in the car with the radio presenter "I'm bored to death let's argue", she sang just two years ago in her beautifully snippy break-up song "Born Confused", the associated, raw, intense album "Every Bad « turned the band from Brighton into celebrated stars of the scene.
Porridge Radio also remain quarrelsome with the follow-up album, one could argue, for example, that they have to be careful not to sprinkle too many cranberries into their painkiller mush.
(6.9)
Marina Herlop – »Pripyat«
Barcelona-born musician Marina Herlop was already inspired by Ukrainian folklore on her last album »Babasha« with the track »Odessa«. Her third release, the first on the Berlin electronic label Pan, now bears the title »Pripyat«, it seems i.e. to dedicate it to the deserted and overgrown town near the damaged reactor after the Chernobyl disaster.
Why and with what intention?
The listener of this fascinating, but also appealingly encoded music has to feel that for himself.
For the first time, Herlop, who previously only used piano and voice for her rather neoclassical draft, designed her tracks completely on the computer, experimented with Carnatic vocal music from India, played with interspersed beats, hissing noises, jagged rhythms.
The result is reminiscent of the similarly intercultural hyperpop of her colleague Rosalía, who is also Catalan, but also of the electronic folk music of Ibeyi.
And of course when you think of intricate chorales like »Miu« you also think of the sound cathedrals of the Venezuelan producer and musician Arca.
So if the most exciting pop avant-garde seems Spanish at the moment, that's right.
(7.9)
Lykke Li – »Eye-Eye«
It's quite funny to imagine listening to these 33 minutes, produced deliberately lo-fi and crappy in the bedroom, without knowing that behind them lies the pop hope of 2008, which was fulfilled for a few years: Would you like the Swede Lykke Li sign because of this demo tape, which is also their comeback after four years?
phew
Potential could already be seen in the cute ballad sketch "No Hotel" or the self-catching vocals in "Carousel".
But jumbled cliché collections dramatized with a lot of reverberations like "Highway To Your Heart" or futile attempts at Lana Del Rey like "5D" still lack depth.
The whole cleverly asserted audiovisual album concept: just palindromic antics too.
Anxious Question: Perhaps the creative flows
(5.5)
