Brat is the year’s best dance-pop album. And C,XOXO is what you get when order Brat from Temu.
It’s about
time the 2020s gave us some radical dance-pop. We’ve certainly had some fun
dance-pop albums - I loved Future Nostalgia, Dawn FM and Renaissance.
But all those albums were moulded heavily around pop sounds from the past:
70s disco, 80s synthpop and 90s house. Brat, on the other hand, is the
dance-pop sound of the future.
Yes, there
are a few nods to 00s and 90s dance music including the whirring
Wearing-My-Rolex-meets-Bonkers synth of ‘Von Dutch’ and the looped ‘back back
back’ part of B2B (very similar to Moloko’s ‘Sing It Back’). But bangers like ‘360’
and ‘Sympathy Is A Knife’ sound ultramodern. Long-time collaborator A.G. Cook
is credited as a producer on most of these tracks – his punchy cutting-edge
hyperpop synths are so fresh and forward-thinking that I feel like I ought to
be listening to them in a driverless car with a VR headset on. Meanwhile,
Charli’s hooky semi-rapped auto-tuned hyper-British delivery makes her sounds
like a London supermodel crossed with an android. This synthetic voice/organic
accent approach makes her the antithesis of a UK singer like Adele (organic
voice/synthetic accent). It’s fresh and exciting.
What about
the lyrics? Are they any good? I’ll admit that the biggest issue I’ve had with
Charli’s music in the past is that her lyrics have always seemed very bratty.
And Brat is definitely bratty. However, unlike the snotty ‘Fuck you
sucker’ brattiness that Charli was displaying 10 years ago, this feels like
a classier and more tongue-and-cheek brattiness. An endearingly sassy and silly
brattiness – a prime example being when she sings ‘I’m everywhere, I’m so
Julia’. I don’t know what that means, but her delivery sells it. It makes
me wish I felt so Julia too.
She also counterbalances
this brattiness by getting surprisingly vulnerable on some of these tracks. ‘Girl,
So Confusing’ delves into her love/hate relationship with an unnamed fellow pop
star who she is frequently compared to (since confirmed to be Lorde). And then
there’s ‘I think about it all the time’, which is about the decision whether or
not to have kids. I’d love Charli to delve more into this personal side on
future albums. I also kinda wish she’d ended the album on ‘I think about it all
the time’, because ‘365’ is a pretty abrupt change in tone.
I guess we
ought to now talk about Camilla Cabello’s C,XOXO.
The ex-Fifth-Harmony-member has been dropping sultry Latin pop hits
since going solo, but now she’s decided to rebrand herself as a party girl. And
something tells me Charli XCX may have been an inspiration? Not only does ‘C,XOXO’
sound like an AI image generator tried to write ‘Charli XCX’, but the first
song on the album is titled ‘I LUV IT’. And although it doesn’t sound like Charli’s
‘I Love It’, it does have a similar hyperpop sound to many of her
post-Vroom-Vroom songs.
Cabello also douses
her voice in auto-tune throughout this album like Charli. But despite all this
copycat behaviour, sounds nothing like Brat. It wants to be a cutting-edge
dance-pop album - and to be fair the first four songs do have some interesting
production. But then we get ‘Twentysomethings’, which is a garden-variety
acoustic ballad, and things get a bit wishy-washy from here on in. Meanwhile, Cabello
doesn’t have the hooks to rival Charli. The catchiest hook here is probably the
‘ILOVEITILOVEITILOVEITILOVEITILOVEITILOVEITILOVEIT’ chorus on ‘I Luv It’,
and it’s more annoying than catchy.
The guest
performances on C,XOXO also bring the quality of the album down. ‘I Luv
It’ features Carti’s laziest and most unintelligible verse to date – which is a
shame considering how fun the beat is. Meanwhile, the two Drake features don’t
sit too well. Wasn’t Drake just criticising Kendrick for guest features on pop
records? And here he is on a Camila Cabello album.
Oddly, C,XOXO
ends up feeling more nostalgic than forward-thinking, incorporating interpolations
of songs like Pitbull’s ‘Hotel Room Service’ and The Dream’s ‘Shawty Is A 10’
into the mix that take away from the occasionally modern production. It’s like
she’s trying to rekindle the club sound of 2010. Whereas Charli is presenting the
club sound of 2030. To conclude, Brat is so Julia. C,XOXO isn’t.
Brat by Charli XCX: ★★★★☆
C,XOXO by Camilla Cabello: ★★☆☆☆