Did a first listen on two late-year teenpop albums by post-teenpoppers, not to be confused with post-teenpop. Katy Rose is the inscrutable poetess behind the Run Lola Run-song-evoking "Watching the Rain" (which is a much better song, for the record) and excellent Avril-lite schlub-lilt ballad "Overdrive," also much better etc.
Her new album was released on CDBaby first as far as I can tell, and has now made its way to iTunes. Can't tell if there's a physical release anywhere. Katy's always been a touch dark (check out her fan board for some truly messed up Lord of the Flies meets Mean Girls action), and I'm really digging this album for its general batshitness. (Batshitty?) Still wading through her lyrics (nice Sylvia Plath dig in there somewheres, I think).
What's interesting about Katy is that her intonation is all Avril smugness, this sorta husky know-it-all voice from someone whose lyrics don't exactly suggest knowing it all, or even most of it. But she gets away with it. She goes the extra mile emo-poetry-wise and I actually laugh...with her! Because I can.
Album's all over the map, but a major improvement on her first one, I think, which was about 60% boring, 20% gold, 20% crap. This is about 80% weird, 10%...uh, silver, maybe, and 10% boring. Less boring = good!
Right now the one wrapping its way into my brain is "Sloth": she takes some kinda nasty prescription meds and it drives her intestines crazy. Makes her feel almost dirty (in the intestinal sense?) and so she loses...uh, something. Woozy loop with synth pizzicato strings and synths buzzing about when they feel like it. Nu-Xtina harmonies.
And for vintage Katy lyrical WTF, try "Pornography": "My wisdom teeth are coming in so I know what to do / I'll fall asleep to pornography but it's of me and you." Gets into a cacophonous little groove until these canned little power chords come in for the chorus. It's pretty great.
Plus one (1) ballad, not bad ("All Silver Rusts") and a flat-out ham-fisted Queen disco attempt to close the mother out. Ends up sounding kind of like Dahv (not a bad thing). I might stick this on my top ten list, actually. Because I can. (Woops I already did that.)
And then there's HOKU! Whose autograph, yes, yes, I did receive in the mail. Yes. Pictured above. ADDRESSED TO ME. "DAVID." THAT'S ME.
As for the music...uh, it's nice. S'fisticated even. Y'know, the kind of thing you might listen to at dinner with Hoku [EDIT: Or with Vanessa Hudgens, maybe, sounds like her stuff a bit, too]. I have nothing more to say about it. It's nice! Forgettable. I forgot it, anyway. But will probably listen to it again distractedly! More Tab? (<--do they still make this?)
Important TIE IT ALL TOGETHER revelation: every single name even remotely connected to teenpop this year went dance except Kelly Clarkson, who was promptly punished. (And the Jonas Brothers, who don't count anymore because Nick's voice changed.) (And Megan McCauley, maybe, but "Tap That" implicates her in this revelation as much as anyone else; in fact she was kind of at the HEAD OF THE CLASS until she disowned it and then sort of re-owned it a little.) (And Mandy Moore, who is clueless but put out a nice enough album and to be fair did cover Rihanna along with everyone else.)
Even the friggin' PIERCES are doing club ennui ("Boring"). So has teenpop become so marginalized/niche-ized that it just doesn't give a shit anymore (since none of it is seemingly selling as dance music, which isn't to say none of it is selling at all -- but all of the sellers are inside-Disney releases, so aesthetic impact is tricky; harder to tell these days what's a reflection of the audience and what's, um, being forced upon the audience because there is no alternative whatsoever to homeproduct trust me I checked; side note, Disney's been primarily dance from day one, only doing a foray into rock-rock from which they still haven't totally emerged even now [cf. Jonases who I guess can still count] around Hilary Duff mk. 1 -- but since she was their first and biggest success, the ball rolled as it rolled, and I imagine HSM and its alums have changed the game back to c. 2000 (more like c. 1990) sunshineteenybopper dance, which is as good a place as any to start my A*Teens blurb, I guess)?
So you can only find rock in country, you can only find jaded dance music in teenpop, the only place you can find Kylie is indie-swing, and the defining American pop sound in 2007 is what UK/Europe sounds like in every other year of the decade but 2007 (I still think Kate Nash is pretty good! [EDIT: And the Sugababes are doing a dance version of what the Veronicas did last year, which was a version of what Kelly C. did one to two years before!]), except the Americans have a much better star system. will.i.am is a bona fide star and the best Robyn can do is Britney back-up. Have you people learned nothing from Hollywood? We've seen this before: the star system eats itself but stays intact, no matter how ugly and insignificant and abused and etc. you try to make the stars. Britney could be a Xerox of a Xerox of her ass (and it is her ass, don't give me some bullshit about Robyn hopping up there while no one was looking) (and for the record I wouldn't say her new album is this at all, in fact I think she's deep deep into the grooves of it, the only thing missing from it is an up close/personal YAWN and/or SNEEZE and then, pause, "'scuse me" and back to the beat) and she'd still have more star power/presence than four Rachel Stevenses and a dozen Margaret Bergers and twenty Roisin Murphys and forty Sophie Ellis Bextors and...how many Sugababes can dance on the head of a pin? And just about every last one of 'em is better (give or take half...pleaetc.)! How fucked up is that??
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