Album review: REPUTATION (Taylor Swift)

A month shy of turning 28, Taylor Swift has been around the block and suffered a few knocks to her standing (not to mention her heart) for her troubles. Her sixth album comes at some time when some self-reflection is much-needed.

With a title like ‘Reputation’, she’s certainly cognisant of that artefact. It would be trite to dub her 15-track album as a ‘confessional’, as she’s always been very forthcoming about wearing her heart on her sleeve, and channelling her painful life experiences into song-writing inspiration, but there's a salient self-awareness in this album that was perhaps lacking in her previous work.

ALBUM REVIEW: Dangerous Woman (Ariana Grande)

From the first time I heard Ariana Grande’s collaboration with Iggy Azalea, ‘Problem’ in 2014, which, along with the film BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOUR, epitomised my feelings towards my a certain someone (#cryptic), I have been staunchly #TeamAri. The Italian-American songstress is great to look at, has fantastic vocal range, and effortlessly exudes sex appeal (the élan with which she peers up from her white Lolita sunglasses in the 'Bang Bang' music video is a kind of sultry swagger I can but only dream of). So it was with great excitement that I waited for Dangerous Woman, her third studio album, with. So much so, in fact, that I’m currently writing a female version of TRAINING DAY, and, have assigned it ‘Dangerous Woman’ as the film’s working title.

The album’s eponymous lead single is terrifically catchy. ‘Something about you, makes me wanna do things that I shouldn’t’, Ariana croons, whilst in the music video, she slinks around provocatively in lingerie, showing that she is well and truly through with the good girl image which she initially sported when she first became famous. If Yours Truly was clean!Ari, My Everything, with songs such as 'Love Me Harder' and 'Hands On Me' were suggestive-but-PG-13!Ari, then Dangerous Woman is full-on femme fatale, R-rated!Ari. And she’s not here to half-step. She’s owning it.

‘Side to Side’, Ariana’s third collaboration with Nicki Minaj, is probably their weakest so far, but it says a lot about the collective quality of the music these two women make together that it is still a more than solid 8/10 track. I loved the reggae vibe of the song, as well as the employment of Nicki’s verbal fireworks for the rapping, but I thought the actual lyrical quality of the rap was a bit weak, with practically every other line being an allusion to one of Nicki’s previous hits. By contrast, the employment of Macy Gray in ‘Leave Me Lonely’, one of the few melancholic songs on the album, works a treat, with Gray’s gravelly voice suiting the sombre words she’s singing perfectly.

As with her preceding two albums, the tracks I tend to enjoy more are the upbeat, funky ones. ‘Greedy’ tells the story of a woman’s high appetite for a certain something (spoiler alert: it’s not for food), and with electro-pop beats, a brass band, and best of all, her voice hitting stratospherically high notes, makes for a great musical party. ‘Everyday’ is very similarly thematically to ‘Greedy’ but the beats are more RnB-infused, demonstrating Grande’s musical versatility, and how her voice is so strong it crosses genres. The album’s only major misstep is ‘Sometimes’, a slow-moving guitar-led track which sounds like a lazy B-side that is just at odds with the musical flavour with the rest of the album.

The standout track of Dangerous Woman, for me, is ‘Let Me Love You’, an unashamedly saucy song in which Ariana Grande gets to put her vocals to their breathy best. (Some people aren’t such a big fan of the way she sounds out of breath when delivering her lyrics, but I really dig it). Lil Wayne’s rap on it is a good foil to her verses, and his bluntness in ‘I said girl you need a hot boy / she said you need to stop fucking with them thots boy’ evokes memories of his featuring credit on Kelly Rowland's 'Motivation', another brazen foray into smut where his rhyming was both irreverent and intelligent. Furthermore, the cavalier little nod to Beyonce’s ‘Irreplaceable’ when Grande asserts ‘I know they'll be coming from the right and the left, left, left’ shows she KNOWS she’s the ish. Arrogance among popstars is obviously a double-edged sword; you need to acknowledge the fact that you’re HBIC, but at the same time not become insufferable. Egotism is justified if it's merited. Within that lyric, we have the album in a microcosm: a woman discovering, nay, asserting her allure. In Ariana Grande’s case, it’s well-deserved.

Some music fans are perturbed that Ariana Grande, who despite being 22 old, still looks like a little kid, being so overtly sexual on Dangerous Woman. But, in her defence, she’s already had her squeaky clean period, and she’s over that. She gave us a hint of her more carnal instincts when she told us ‘she might have let you hold her hand at school, but Imma show you how to graduate’ and other such double entendres on her second album, but Queen Ari isn’t here for innuendo any more. To paraphrase Dennis Hopper in BLUE VELVET, "Ari wants to fuck". This pretty doe-eyed girl is blossoming into a dangerous woman. And her music has never sounded better as a result.

Grade: A

Album Review: Take Me Home (One Direction)

The dreamy boy band’s second album had a difficult job, having to follow up to last year’s “Up All Night”, which featured the massively popular One Thing, Gotta Be You, and especially What Makes You Beautiful which was one of the tunes selected to be sung in the Olympics closing ceremony. The sequel, however, more than lives up to billing, The Godfather Part II of albums, if you will. There isn’t a song on it that stands out quite as much as What Makes You Beautiful did, but the overall quality is much greater.

The opening track, Live While We’re Young, an ode to living for the moment and YOLO-ing it up, is the closest to being the WMYB of the album, filled with up-tempo beats and cheeky one liners (“and if you get together, get together, don’t let the pictures leave your phone.”) Even the chorus, “let’s go crazy crazy crazy ‘til we see the sun”, you can imagine singing in a manner identical to the chorus to WMYB, and Zayn delivers some powerhouse at the refrain of “And giiiiiiirl, you and I, we’re about to make some memories tonight”; Mr Malik, in my opinion, is the one who has come the furthest, vocally, between the first and second albums.

If Live While We’re Young is aurally sounds similar to What Makes You Beautiful, Little Things is the mature, poignant extension of the “you don’t know you’re beautiful” lyric – taking it further and devoting an entire songs to girls’ insecurities. Zayn and Liam open the song and then sing together on the chorus, and their voices fit as well as the proverbial glove, with Zayn’s dulcet tones complementing Liam’s. Louis Tomlinson (my pick for the fittest of the five), still has questions that need answering about his vocals, and he doesn’t go anywhere to dispelling the notions that he can’t sing here, but overall, this is a sweet, calming ballad, and a nice peek  into the boys’ more muted side.

The emotional side to the boys also comes out in They Don’t Know About Us, where Zayn again brings his A-game, as do Harry and Niall, who deliver fewer words but sing the lines that play perfectly to their strengths (Niall gets a few lines of that whispering schtick, which really goes to boost the baby-faced blonde’s sex appeal). In terms of lyrics, there is nothing in this song that will raise the roof – it’s about how the secret moments that other people don’t know between a pair of lovers are the most beautiful (and some scepticism has to go to a bunch of teenage lads singing about ~true love~). But it’s a cute number nonetheless with some lush usage of surging strings and tinkling piano chords to contribute to the romantic tone.

My pick for the best singer of the five still remains Liam Payne, and you get to hear this in Last First Kiss and Rock Me. However, as noted, Zayn is most improved, and hearing Harry Styles successfully belt out those high notes – as he does in Last First Kiss – is also a treat. There are a few filler numbers that really don’t bring anything to the album – C’mon C’mon and Heart Attack being the prime culprits here, as well as S, two songs which sound very similar to the buffer songs on Up All Night, as well as Summer Love being a somewhat of a disappointing closer to the album.

But I Would redeems them, which is a sort of boyband equivalent of Taylor Swift’s You Belong with Me. There are a few lyrics in it which are pretty tenuous, “Cos I can’t compete with your boyfriend, he’s got 27 tattoos” ( I get that they’re trying to convey he’s hard, but someone under 20 with 27 tattoos? Sure.), but it doesn’t detract from being an upbeat, bittersweet pop number, all the better for the cheery "yeah"s hollered with aplomb by the lads at the end. Similarly, Rock Me features a bitching Queen-esque intro, Harry and Liam doing their best Nickelback impressions, and Louis Tomlinson’s classic amusing attempts to alternate between singing falsetto then doing sultry. It doesn’t sound like it should work, but trust me, it does.

If Up All Night was One Direction after they’d had too many blue smarties, Take Me Home is them a few months later, realising the folly of their hyper ways, but not so much that they’re ready to trade in their Jay Gatsbyesque lives just yet. And when they have so much fun making sweet music, I’m glad they haven’t.

Grade: A

Two central London restaurant reviews.

My Old Place (E1 7EZ)

Smack bang in London’s financial centre where lots of the people who work there are too busy to sort out their own packed lunches, My Old Place is a favourite among busy commuters to sit down in and eat their lunch. The fact that it’s frequented by Chinese people is a testament to the quality of the food; we tend to be more critical of the food of our homelands. The food is made on order and thus fresh and delicious, unlike in several other diners in Chinatown, where items such as egg fried rice taste horribly stale. The quantities of salt, pepper, sauces and various other condiments are added just the right side of tasty without being over the top in the usage, and there are some exciting dishes to be experienced. However, what lets this place down is the quality of the waiters, which is haughty bordering on rude. I went with a group of English friends and they regarded all of us with a disdainful “what are you all doing here? This is a Chinese only place” glare and one of our orders were mixed up, for which they didn’t even apologise for, merely act as if it was our fault we couldn’t read the menu. So it’s a shame, really, because the food is great, the prices are very reasonable considering the location, but the staff could really do with a class or ten in bedside manner.
Grade: B-

L’Arco (SW1W 0QJ)

A highly likeable restaurant in Victoria with a genuinely homely vibe, Ristorante L’Arco boasts some genuinely Italian waiters who really take the time to get you whatever you want. The food was served promptly on ordering, and cooked to perfection, as well as fairly well priced considering the to-die-for-location. I had tomato omelette and chips, which came to around ten pounds, which I considered fair, particularly as the tomato sauce tasted divine. My only criticisms with this place were that, whilst the food was good value, the drinks were far too expensive, and also that the menu, whilst would most certainly suffice, didn’t offer anything massively imaginative. But, if you want to play it safe on a date, you can’t go wrong with L’Arco.
Grade: B+/A-