Review Summary: we grow old, we don't grow up
Lorde wants you to know she doesn’t go to
those parties anymore. She’s in her twenties now, drinking wine instead of ciders and considering her actions before – not after – she makes them. The only thing that hasn't changed is her highly public and fascinating love affair with pop. By this point, though, it’s the type of pop that bleeds and stumbles and pretends it’s all okay when it isn’t. Truthfully,
Melodrama is a façade, upheld by seductive pop instrumentation, artificial sweetener and imagined bravado (she warned us she’d find it).
There are two moments on this record where pop’s heartbroken heiress escapes to a quiet room, while the party continues to collect empty bottles around her.
Liability is a fresh wound of a song, swept up into the arms of its melancholic piano and carried home. It could be the first song on the album, signifying a change in sound and informing this album as its existence being wholly contingent on the events that succeeded
Pure Heroine. It’s Lorde beginning the narrative at the end and ruminating in a way that’s only possible in a thick, heavy silence. By the same token,
Sober II (Melodrama) is all those empty bottles breaking at once, with Lorde at the centre; hollowed out and alarmingly clear-headed. These songs are a much-needed respite – hot-blooded journal entries that reflect that slow-motion couple of minutes where you find yourself, exceptionally drunk, staring languidly into someone else’s bathroom mirror and thinking:
Fuck, I wanna go home, like, now.
Of course, Lorde recognises how ridiculous this all is. The album is called
Melodrama after all. The title is a step removed, a perfunctory shrug; as in you don’t get to give your songs names like
Hard Feeling/Loveless if you refuse to consider the possibility that your behaviour is as obnoxiously overblown as the neon signage that fronts whichever club you and your friends drink too much in. Even at the epicentre of this night-out, though, Lorde is unequivocally concerned with avoiding that bratty, self-absorbed image. In fact, it’s the opposite – insecurity is a surface level concept on
Melodrama. People actually seem to connect more through their common doubts than they do their common interests and – when coupled with the typical pop instrumentation – the lyrical themes play out like some sort of critique of pop sensationalism. It seeps into her vocals, too. Lorde spits out lines like:
“Will you sway with me / go astray with me?” with a wry smile, then laughs off the naivete off it all. No, life is more like glamour’s underbelly than glamour itself, and you’ll have the cops called on you
(Writer in the Dark) before you become the Kings and Queens of the weekend
(Sober).
As a record that will end up embedded in the fabric of modern pop music regardless of its critical reception, the sound of
Melodrama renounces the restrained electro-pop of its predecessor. It revels in its subject matter, taking soaring hooks and cushioning them with walls of gleaming synth chords, strings and pianos. Musically, there is a continuity than runs through the record – ideas play out and are then returned to later on as Lorde sinks further into the night.
Supercut’s bouncy piano lead is a facsimile of
Green Light’s and yet it sounds completely submerged, as if the wounds (the last remnants of a bygone relationship) have finally healed over.
Hard Feelings/Loveless is empathetic and dejected until it’s sadistic and gleeful – with its cartoonishly twee vocal performance and stutter-stepping beat.
This party covers all the bases of a defining, deafening night out, as slipshod and difficult to recall as they may be; but it ends on Fight Club levels of fucked-up catharsis.
Perfect Places has Lorde at rock bottom, with the final line:
“what the fuck are perfect places anyway?”. It’s a dark place to end on, but a necessary one. That one line – resting on everything that came before it – signifies a realisation that the best way to be happy is to accept that your time and place may never be right, and that proactivity is key.
Lorde wants you to know she doesn’t go to
those parties anymore. She throws her own, where every throwaway observation is worth immortalizing in a smoke-stained hook, and poet’s congratulation is passed around the table like trading cards. No one talks too much, no one dances too little. She’s staggering by the end of
Melodrama, but she is one life-changing piece of information the wiser: her heart is not wherever the last person she fell in love with has left it, it’s where the cab takes her at five-o-clock in the morning. I just hope she’s prepared for the hangover.
