Club-pop’n’house blasts of pleasure for the controlled millennial hedonist.
What constitutes thrill seeking for the on point millennial of today? A great peloton workout? Passing out during Bikram yoga? The excitement of a perfectly ripe avocado? As club venues close, alcohol sales drop and we’re all getting that bit more serious, is there still a place for banger-infested, dancefloor-as-therapy hedonism in pop music? Georgia says yes! (sort of). This record doesn’t quite let rip into tops-off-and-glow sticks debauchery (although it has its moments). Nor does it follow the sad banger template of Robyn (although there’s more than one Robyn shaped shadow hanging over it). Instead, we’re left with a pleasingly left-field set of clubby sophisto-Euro pop that slyly mixes its influences to conjure up some excellent “moments” whilst retaining some head scratchingly odd flourishes.
It starts off –appropriately enough – with “Started Out” one of the albums strongest tracks where shiny rippling keyboards float in and out, underpinned by a house-infused 80’s elastic bass line. The spectre of 80’s pop and Chicago house are the two most obvious music templates if you were to describe this record, although these specific sounds are melded cleverly into a swirling melting of weird bleeps and blips, so they never dominate any one song.
The grammatically challenging “About Work the Dancefloor” you’re probably already familiar with, underpinned by an insidious, juddering “Dancing on My Own’-style throb that gives way to a monotone chorus that sounds like a speeded-up Bat for Lashes. The whole track is great (although it perhaps doesn’t work the dancefloor quite as hard as it thinks it does.) It could be the sort of thing that Little Boots or Annie we're doing back in 2009, but given a 2019 sheen, and there’s enough ecstatic escape as she sings “to be in a moment with you” to hint at the thrills she’s seeking. The excellent “Never Let You Go” continues the momentum with a brilliantly bubbling keyboard that runs up and down the spine of the track, leading to a big 80’s chorus, and “24 Hours” completes the four-square drive of the albums opener, complete with a joyous “This is where we begin…whoa!” that could be Girls Aloud at their most bizarre.
After that, the record takes a turn for the introspective, gets a bit odder, and doesn’t hit all its targets. “Mellow” begins with off kilter static and a repeated lyric about “amaretto…vodka jello, all night, all night ” Lyrically – it seems to sum up the head space of the thrill seeker but it doesn’t sound at all like a pleasurable experience, whilst “Ray Guns” sounds too obviously like an M.I.A rip-off to work on its own terms.
But things come together brilliantly on “Feel It” where the Chicago House/80’s fusion works best, (but given a dubstep sheen for added impact). And “The Thrill” seems to encapsulate the plight of the 20 something modern party goer. “We need to seek a thrill/Like chasing the mill/You're working too hard/And then those problems start.” The admission that “now I pour fire over something I desire” seems to point to a generation caught between anxiety and responsibility, wanting to cut loose and feel the thrill, but in the knowledge that nothing (these days) is ever consequence free. In that sense, this could be the perfect record to usher in 2020.
