Review Summary: Tove Lo introduces herself as our "brand new disaster" and pop music is all the better for it.
What can I say about the amazing Tove Lo without coming across as a massive fan girl? From the first time I heard Tove Lo effortlessly sing Heroes (We Could Be), I was breath-taken by her voice and how her presence on the track completely owned the song, completing overpowering the amazing production work from Alesso. While more mainstream contemporaries like Ariana Grande undoubtedly have stronger vocals, especially in a live setting, that song introduced us to a rawness and authenticity in her voice that separates us from the rest. At the time she was still underneath the pop music radar, but that song introduced us to Tove Lo, Sweden’s hottest export. Once I became aware of the fact that this song was featured on the Blueprint Edition of her debut Queen Of The Clouds, I got that version of the album without a second doubt. I only write that lengthy and seemingly unconnected introduction to tell the reader what I think of Tove Lo as an artist based on her debut, and to introduce us to her underrated sophomore effort and what I personally view as her best album., I’ve been digesting this deceptively short album for the past two years before coming up with my final verdict on it, which I now want to share in light of it nearly being the one year anniversary of Blue Lips, the final two chapters of this album. As alluded to before, Lady Wood is a sprawling concept album about the beginning of (and the ultimate demise of) a relationship. These first two chapters, Fairy Dust and Fire Fade, explores the initial rush of that relationship and how heartbreaking realisations can occur once that rush fades. While having this presented to us as a four-part concept album is a pretty ambitious goal in this streaming and single-driven age, the overarching theme is nothing new to pop music, a genre seemingly devoted to the timeless art of falling in and out of love. So how does this album differentiate itself from the identikit pop that has come before it? By playing well as a full-length album and not just as a single-driven cash-in!
Fairy Dust, the first section of the album, does not have a bad track on it and it manages to engages the listener from start to finish. Each and every track moves along at an efficient pace, with each song pulsating an undercurrent of genuine sexiness that is pretty rare in pop music these days, when sex appeal and manufactured appeal seems to be one and the same. Influence, for example, starts as your basic minimalist hip-pop song with a gripping pre-chorus that drops to a suspenseful yet playful chorus. The bridge plays host to a brief rap feature by Wiz Khalifa which is welcome despite being the most obvious beg for radio play, his double-time flow adding some energy and fluidity to the proceedings before the final chorus releases all that pent-up energy release in pure dance-floor fodder. It’s a delight sure, but it’s also the clearest example of how generic the album can appear from the surface level. It’s a good thing then that the title track, and early album highlight, comes along to show how the formulaic pop music of the moment can be modified to actually become something refreshing. While Influence was more geared towards urban audiences, the title track makes a very welcome diversion to house music. If the other songs on this section have sexiness as an undercurrent, this song is overflowing with it, from the addictive and melodic pre-chorus to the bridge when everything else fades out and Tove Lo confesses to her object of desiring causing her to have the self-coined and titular phrase “Lady Wood”, sounding completely natural although it might not seem it on paper. I love it and can imagine it being empowering to so many people who. The other songs on this section are all on the same level, with True Disaster exploring the push-and-pull of toxic relationships complete with a electronic-driven beat that outdoes and suppresses the excellent 1989 in the process. When she sneers “zero f---s about it, I know I’m gonna get hurt”, she perfectly communicates the mixed emotions of fear, vulnerability and confidence inherent in the song all at once. Cool Girl was the perfect lead single to kick off the Lady Wood era and Vibes, a bold duet with Joe Janiak, actually switches it up with an addictive guitar loop accommodated by a trendy trap-based breakdown and closes the chapter off with a song that perfectly captures the mutual cynicism that some people might enter rebounds following a break-up with. Another interlude then brings us to the second chapter, also known as Fire Fade.
While Fire Fade doesn’t switch things up musically or in terms of tempo, which means that the sadder tracks are almost the exact same tempo as the happier tracks, this adds depth to the overall concept by suggesting that at a certain point, happiness and sadness become interchangeable when you’ve been in too many disastrous relationships. If you have handled the maturity and bleakness masquerading as dance-floor euphoria up until now, then Fire Fade is actually a pretty positive closing in the sense that it asks important questions and shows a sense of self-awareness that most break-up songs or “anthems” do not. The R&B leaning Don’t Talk About It makes the pretty bold and welcome, although slightly hypocritical given the first half of the album, move of criticising people who lead a drug-infused, party-heavy lifestyle while Flashes has Tove Lo achingly opening up about how her new-found popularity has affected her relationships with family and friends and the loneliness of fame. These two songs are ultimately my favorite songs from the album since they explicitly go against the grain and can be viewed as warnings against turning to vices in order to avoid tackling personal/social/political issues (Don’t Talk About It) and discussions regarding the impact of social media and internet culture on our relationships with ourselves and the people around us (Flashes and, to a lesser extent, Don’t Talk About It). Imaginary Friend could be talking about either loneliness or the demise of a relationship and Keep It Simple offers a somber counterpart to the entirety of Fairy Dust by exploring the sadness that can lead to one-night stands and cheating. I’ve mentioned little to nothing about the actual music in this chapter because it’s essentially the sadder version of Fairy Dust. However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a few clever tricks up Tove’s sleeve in this section to help flesh her concept out; it’s interesting how the fastest song on the album, the closer WTF Love Is, is also the most cynical song on the album, the logical conclusion where Tove Lo wonders what the point is in chasing empty relationships. Also appreciated is how R&B influences are used in Don’t Talk About It to criticise the party and hook-up culture so much of R&B (and the first half of this album, ironically enough) and how vocolder is used in the climax of Flashes to stimulate a loss of internal identity in the process of being famous, a trick previously used over a decade ago in Britney Spears Piece Of Me.
While it is important to explore albums in the context of their individual songs or sections, it is nearly impossible to do this in the case of Lady Wood. This is because the music does not change much throughout the album, which is unusual even in the context of pop concept albums. In this project, you can expect pop, dance or urban-influenced music all minimalist and all about dysfunctional relationships. While interchangeable songs are usually a weakness in regards to albums, since they eventually bore the listener who is wanting something more, it actually works in Lady Wood where the overall portrait being painted is ultimately empty and bleak and it shows that Tove Lo is actually a pretty intelligent artist who ultimately cares about her craft, even if it does come across. At this point, I should say that while this is a “pop album” in genre, this is not something to listen to when in the presence of more modest company due to the amount of sex, swearing and drug usage that appears in the whole of the album, although that should be obvious from the album and song titles alone. As a whole, this is one of the more interesting albums in pop music at the minute and it holds up extremely well as a concept, apart from the slight disconnect and hypocrisy that the contrast of the two chapters inherently has; I mean, it is slightly interesting that Tove Lo is condemning people who use drugs and casual sex when five tracks earlier she was bragging about being “under the influence”, although I still think that Tove Lo is brave for self-reflecting and openly pointing the emptiness of that lifestyle out.
Overall, time and maturity has only increased my appreciation for the whole Lady Wood project, and this might be my favorite album from her yet, since the filler has been cut out and what is left is an examination and deconstruction of what pop and urban music has openly infused about for decades now, with no dud tracks in there whatsoever. While both Queen Of The Clouds and Blue Lips are more experimental and are as good as Lady Wood, and probably better if looking at all her albums purely on a track-by-track basis, this is the album that I keep on coming back to even though Blue Lips is the other half of this album because it holds up so well and could be considered a part of the list of examples of how long-form pop albums should be done: thought-out, consistent and suited to it's purpose. So here's to Tove Lo, our true disaster who keeps on coming out with underrated pop gems.
