- If you ask me why I was so excited about the Brisbane leg of Taylor Swift’s Reputation tour, it wasn’t a burning urge to scream along to We Are Never Getting Back Together. It was my anticipation of her support act, Charli XCX, ditching the Gabba straight after and making her way into the Valley. The modern brit-pop icon pulled tracks from her 2016 EP Vroom Vroom, and recent Y2K-ified record Pop 2, appearing alongside a line-up which included Banoffee and Miss Blanks. In a skint rainbow bodysuit, she pulled plenty of shapes, flirted with the front row, stage-dove into a manic room of micro-popstar disciples.
The Bey/Ari/Katy/Swift oligopoly we saw in pop music a decade ago is gradually fragmenting, and the influence of so-called “alt-popstars” like Charli can be heard in the output of local acts Hatchie and Mallrat. In recent weeks, FKA Twigs and Banks have returned with glistening material which continues to build upon their strong artistic vision. And last Friday, after a four-year wait, Carly Rae Jepsen dropped Dedicated, the latest album after cult hit Emotion, and it’s companion B-sides collection.
Jepsen has previously proven herself capable of Teenage Dream-level bubblegum on tracks like Cut to the Feeling and Run Away With Me - a decidedly high-key, jubilant work of lovesick bliss.
On the ‘chill-disco’-inspired Dedicated, she proves she can still conjure the emotional headrush with Want You in My Room, a track covered in Jack Antonoff’s fingerprints. Spice Girls-style callbacks and shoutouts propel Jepsen to “get bolder”, as she sings “I’ll press you to the pages of my heart” like someone out of a noughties girl-band. The Canadian is thirty-three, but her all-in hope in the romantic is still believable as she declares herself a ‘lighthouse’, reminding her would-be lover where he’s headed.
There’s more of that in No Drug Like Me, when Jepsen sings “If you make me fall in love / then I’ll blossom for you”. And on Julien, which recalls an ever-haunting fling fit for the likes of Lady Gaga in Summerboy, she is sure “it was more than a fantasy / to the end, to the last breath that I breathe.”
Everything He Needs sees Jepsen employ her beloved synths and a vocoder to funk up the refrain of Harry Nillson’s He Needs Me, first written for Shelley Duvall in 1980’s Popeye.
Quiet highlight Too Much flips the sentiment of Lorde’s Liability on its head, as Jepsen asks: “Am I bad for you? / ‘Cause I live for the fire, for the rain, and the drama, too?” It’s just a warning, though - she doesn’t apologise for chasing the rush of crushing, and loving, and falling apart over and over. Aptly closing out the album, Party For One is a triumphant toast to celebrating yourself, and refusing to be minimised.
CRJ wrote more than one-hundred songs for Dedicated. It’s clear that she’s a scholar of the pop-form: has a reverence and an aptitude for it. Taylor Swift herself could use the bridge of I’ll Be Your Girl as a template, full of late-night banging-down of doors and calling-out of names. With artists releasing shorter and shorter records, I’m grateful for fifteen tracks of raw feeling. But fours albums in, Jepsen is still frustratingly opaque to listeners who tend to analyse her music at the micro level. There’s no link between the subjects in any of the tracks, or even a thematic arc, in the vein of Robyn’s highly-anticipated Honey last year. Carly Rae Jepsen surprised her audience with the decision to follow-up the universal Call Me Maybe with a record that didn’t seek broad commercial adulation. Couldn’t she push the boundaries of her own study by revealing some of herself? Maybe she’s conditioned me to expect it, but I want CJR to give me more!
- Aleisha McLaren.