It seems, based on all the reviews and opinion pieces that I've encountered, that I cannot write about Lorde - the NZ-based duo currently making some kind of history over in the US; whose debut album seems to occupy every free wall and display area within the JB Hifi here in Wellington (that bold white font screaming out from the blackness of the artwork - text only, no images) - without first mentioning two things.
One: her name - the young woman with the direct, challenging stare and explosion of thick, brunette hair - is Ella Yelich-O'Connor. This (using her name) feels like a cynical move - an implication of false familiarity. The other half of the duo - the shadow half who handles the instrumental aspects of the music - is Joel Little (ex of Goodnight Nurse and Kids of '88). All the music is written between the two of them, with Yelich-O'Connor handling the lyrics herself. Truth be told, there is so little of either of Little's previous two projects to be heard in Lorde that it must be assumed that Yelich-O'Connor is the dominant force behind the project. The album lists no other input beyond the two - no session musicians, no get-appearances by established names in NZ music... For a major-label pop release this is a startlingly intimate and small-scale arrangement; hermetically-sealed.
Two: she's sixteen. You'll find this noted every-goddamn-where. As if this is the most profound and engaging thing about her - the total sum of her accomplishment. As if this is all that makes her exceptional.
Okay, so it is impressive.
Just to give some sense of proportion - here's what I was doing at that age:
Ladies, please form an orderly queue.
And when I wasn't apparently auditioning for men's fashion catalogues - this would sometimes happen.
Sixteen is a strange age - at least for me it was. I was drifting - uncertain of myself, of who I even was. I was new to the city, new to the school and I didn't feel like I fit anywhere inside my own life. Over the next year or so I would try on different sub-cultures, keeping the pieces that I liked and discarding the rest: hippie, bogan, goth, bohemian. I grew my hair long. I met the right kind of people for a guy like me. Little by little I became more of a person, more of a fully fleshed-out character in the narrative of my life. But sixteen, man, that was a transitional stage.
I can't imagine Ella Yelich-O'Connor going through the same uncertainty. She knows who she damn well is. She has become Lorde.
From now on I'm just going to call her that. When I type 'Lorde', I mean Yelich-O'Connor, same as everyone else.
I first encountered her before the hype hit, without knowing anything of the backstory or the mythology. I didn't even know she was a New Zealander. It was just a single clip, posted as being popular on Youtube. I was drawn in by the name, by the single-frame shot, and by the title of the song - 'Tennis Court' - which triggered a memory of the excellent short film 'Advantage, Satan' by the director of Australian horror/black comedy flick "The Loved Ones". I watched the clip. I was intrigued: by her pallid, neo-Gothic look; by the way the clip was just her - head and shoulders - framed by blackness and the slow flicker of studio lamps; by the tilt of her head - at once cat-like and slightly predatory; by the way her eyes narrowed and her purple lips twisted around the only word in the song she lip-synched to - 'Yeah'.
As for the song itself, I thought immediately of Lana Del Rey - perhaps an unavoidable comparison as both are young women with surprisingly deep, ageless voices; singing melancholy, minor-key melodies over the tick-tock of slo-mo hip-hop rhythms. But whereas Del Rey's songs ache with lavish arrangements of melodramatic Nancy Sinatra-esque strings and the twang of 50s B-movie guitars, Lorde's arrangements are sparser, purely electronic and her songs are not about doomed love and dangerous men. The world Del Rey portrays is a fantasy (and one with more than a whiff of David Lynch surrealism to it) - she plays the role of a privileged, hip-hop Lolita for a cynical age - swooning for a tattooed boy with a killer's eyes. And it is a compelling and decadent fantasy, but an illusory thing nonetheless. Lorde offers something else - something that might even be the truth. Her voice is more direct, warmer, somehow more human. This is bullshit-free pop, man.
And it doesn't fit right - whenever I hear 'Tennis Court', or the big, game-changing hit 'Royals', on the radio they seem to sit uneasily next to, say Katy Perry's 'Roar' or that most-popular of pop dreck Robin Thicke's 'Blurred Lines - a song that seems to celebrate non-consenting sex, I might add.
The pop music world today is a factory-line of hyper-compressed, multi-tracked, auto-tuned, airless and over-produced recordings - songs served up like slabs of cut and processed meat, sealed in cling-film and polystyrene ready for easy consumption. In such a world Lorde's music jars and surprises. Not since Lykke Li's stunning debut 'Youth Novels' have I heard a pop album with as much space in it as 'Pure Heroine'. These songs breathe, man.
Here we have little more than a shifting gauze of synthesized minor chords over the narcotized pulse of drum machines and digitalized hand-claps, with only the odd electronic squeal, flicker or...whale-song?...for texture. And her voice: rich, very strong within its middle register and faintly husky. A voice far older than sixteen. Nothing else on the album is quite as minimalist as 'Royals'. But everything is mid-tempo, melancholy and quietly storm-laden. Beyond that one track, there are no obvious singles, despite the hooks and the choruses.
And it is lazy to write it off as simply another artist following in the wake of Lana Del Rey. There are far stranger vibes to be picked up here. The pitch-shifted vocals that open 'Team' suggest a familiarity with the work of Fever Ray. Elsewhere there is a whisper of the sparkling, haunted electro-indie of fellow country-mates The Naked and Famous. But perhaps most alarmingly, on the first two tracks - 'Tennis Court' and '400 Lux' in particular, I can hear a slight similarity with the short-lived and seemingly forgotten sub-genre Witch House: the doomy synths creep-crawling around the boom-and-echo of electronic drums, the downward chord shifts, the digitally-altered 'Yeah' sounding oddly perverse and challenging - and strongly recalling the queasy, half-speed raps on SALEM's singular album 'King Night'.
For those who don't know or can't recall, Witch House was a genre borne in the wake of The Knife's seminal 'Silent Shout'. In principle it was darkwave and Gothic musical styles adopted and transformed by kids raised on hip-hop and indie. Dense, druggy and depressive; 'King Night' was the defining work of the genre. It had hip-hop beats, vocals smudged and buried within layers of soaring and descending synths, ghostly choral arrangements (like the Cocteau Twins lost in the spaces between stars) and the afore-mentioned sluggish rapping. Of all the dark and disturbing discs within my collection (and given my fondness for black ambient, that's quite a few) 'King Night' is the only one that I feared might actually be doing me some kind of psychological harm. It is something beautiful created from illness, apathy and drug-abuse. But it feels kind of too-real, man...too close. Last I heard one of the guys from SALEM was collaborating with Kanye West (ahem, kollaborating). So he must've done okay.
Now, I'm not saying that Lorde is a secret Witch House fan, the vibe is invariably mere coincidence - the result of draping cold synth layers and minor chords over those beats. Although Witch House fans were something of a hard drug crowd (the Youtube posts beneath SALEM clips are all like "Dude, I did so much blow listening to this album...") so the title 'Pure Heroine' would probably amuse them. I'm just saying that it's damn weird to hear something on the radio that reminds me of this utterly un-media friendly genre.
But back on topic.
Lorde is not at all sexualized in her marketing (despite what Dominion Post critic Simon Sweetman rather creepily and misguidedly asserted in his online review of 'The Love Club EP') - not in her videos (in 'Royals' she barely appears; and then mainly in a confronting, tight close-up that makes the most of her very direct stare) or her promotional photos. Instead she is being marketed on her otherness: the apparent novelty that someone so young could be so assertive, intelligent, and motivated. She is outspoken (I wish she hadn't been forced to retract her Taylor Swift quote; she was right), cusses frequently and writes extremely well. Yet, despite her evident wit and wisdom, that same youthfulness - and the fact that she is a woman - sadly leaves her vulnerable to those same tired criticisms (typically from male media critics and commentators): accusations and assumptions that she is a record label puppet - a propaganda tool, cleverly constructed and marketed (Simon Sweetman again).
I think the reason for her success is simpler than that, and a good deal less cynical. In her music we find subverted hip-hop braggadocio; teenage ennui viewed from a distance and through a glaze of weariness and detachment; a ballsy attitude and a willingness to warp existing forms. We have an album that is undeniably a very tidy pop album (for all that it is a little one-tempo throughout) that offers more than just that - something smarter and savvier and more self-aware. 'Pure Heroine' isn't unique or strikingly original. But it is clever and compelling and articulate. It isn't vapid or disposable. It is something else. And it speaks to a different kind of audience...
I can't know what it is like to be part of the millennial generation (although upon learning that everyone with a birthdate from 1980 up to 2000 or so qualifies, I am near-as-dammit one of their number, seriously - I'm not that old). I can only look at an entire generation raised to believe that they would all be rock-stars and princesses only to instead inherit a world where they are constantly judged - in research papers and media reports - and be told that they are all lazy, narcissistic sociopaths.
Millennials are quite probably the smartest generation ever. This isn't hyperbole, but rather the result of our secret evolution. As our society becomes increasingly complex, inter-connected and technologically-advanced the human brain is hyper-stimulated and responds by developing faster and more efficient neural pathways. Every generation or so, IQ tests have to be scaled up - so as to continue reflecting the current norm. Humans are simply getting smarter.
They're certainly the most educated and inter-connected generation. Their personal lives are played out across message boards and twitter feeds - intimate details sketched out in status updates, exposed and converted into an eternal, digital medium. Yet for all of this, various research papers indicate that they are the loneliest generation, plagued by the far-too whimsical-sounding FOMO (fear of missing out). Psychological reports indicate that we are unhappier with our own lives the more we compare them to others. Well, this generation exists in a constant state of comparison and competition. And they text too damn much.
In Lorde they have found a kind of figurehead - a vicarious voice. She speaks to the yawning gulf between the world they have been taught to aspire to (from the posturing of Kanye West; to the lavish, romantic touchstones of Lana Del Rey; to drug-fueled rock star lunacy "trashing the hotel room"; all the way back to the trappings of success as evidenced in Brian de Palma's film 'Scarface' - which everyone seems to forget, plays out like a Shakespearean tragedy), where success equals fame and excess; and the world that now lies before them. She speaks to a generation well-versed in celebrity meltdowns; to an audience who've grown accustomed to seeing their idols fellate sledgehammers (I couldn't let this slip past without a Miley Cyrus reference now, could I?), piss in buckets and grow up awkward and strange - their adult faces fitting them oddly, like Halloween-mask versions of their former selves.
Ultimately, the Millennials have a pretty shitty deal: they've inherited a world of mass-shootings, un-ending wars, global financial crises, housing shortages, high unemployment and environmental collapse. And still they are the most analyzed, scrutinized and criticized of all the generations. Lorde is one of their number and she has the ability and opportunity to articulate how that feels.
Lorde is intelligent, articulate and self-aware. A gifted and introverted teenager. She's proudly feminist and she knows exactly what that means, unlike so many folks who fall into the lazy assumption that all feminists hate men (total bullshit: feminists like men just fine - they just rightfully expect equality with them and demand to be treated as more than just an object of the male gaze and opinion).
Lorde is simply the right artist at the right time.
Also, 'Pure Heroine' is a fine album and 'Royals' is a singularly catchy song. Hell, that in itself is probably enough.
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