Album review: BANGERZ (Miley Cyrus)

Grabbing headlines for all manner of scandal or internet feud these days is Miley Cyrus, who seems to be on a personal race against time to shed her good-girl image of Hannah Montana. Critics across the field have slammed her for degrading herself, others have said she’s actually a feminist, some have branded her a demon with a tongue that runs stray. 

One thing’s for sure though: I would never have given her album a second thought if it hadn’t been for the attention that VMA performance garnered her. So my suspicion is that, for all the ostensible cringe, girl knows what she’s doing.

The album itself is actually a disappointment in the gossip stakes. Music-wise, she plays it safe in terms of her collaborating partners (Ludacris, Nelly, French Montana). It is notable that the Princess of Pop herself, Britney Spears, makes an appearance on the song SMS (Bangerz). 

Miss Spears herself has been in the public eye a fair share of the time, but one thing that Britney always excelled at throughout was the music. Miley’s got the headline-seeking down to a T, better than Britney herself. But the quality of her art still has some way to go.

The album opens with Adore You, a lethargic piece of schmaltz that fails to make much of an impact. It’s followed by We Can’t Stop, her smash hit single, and my pick for the highlight of the entire ensemble. With an effortless swagger, Miley advises her young following to “Remember only God can judge ya / Forget the haters 'cause somebody loves ya”, which could also been read as a prescription manual for how she is currently living her life. Unlike several of the other songs on Bangerz, the use of autotune actually suits the song and doesn’t feel excessive. It’s an easygoing, casually amoral tune that makes for fun to bop along to.

We Can’t Stop, however, doesn’t redeem the sheer volume of duds on the album. 4x4, which tries to amalgamate Cyrus’ country-music roots with her current RnB target market, plays like a hot mess of hoedown brawl with Nelly hollering “MOTHAFUCKAS” when he feels like it. I cringed throughout. 

SMS (Bangerz) is equally sloppy. Whilst I have nothing wrong with girls bragging about their promiscuity in music (hell, men have been doing it for years), Cyrus seems so keen to ram the “I CAN STRUT. I CAN FUQ WHOEVER I WANT. I HAVE LOTSA FUQ BUDDIES ON SPEED DIAL” message down our throats, that it just sounds a bit tryhard and desperate, again, hailing memories of that trffic VMA performance. And My Darlin' featuring Future, samples Ben E. King’s Stand By Me, with dire consequences.

The majority of the love songs on the album aren’t bad, to be fair to her. Wrecking Ball isclearly stealing from the formula Lana del Rey used in Off to the Races in how she’s singing about a destructive love with a bad man, with Lana’s version being far better, but it’s catchy and affecting enough in its own right. 

FU is my second favourite song on the album – you can feel vitriol and rage at an ex that I can completely sympathise with. Maybe You’re Right captures the whiney rage of breakup that I prefer in Taylor Swift songs, but it’s still listenable.

As a singer, I actually think Miley Cyrus is pretty talented. She holds her own in On My Own, a decent shout for female independence, and in Hands in the Air, an engaging RnB ditty, she exhibits her skill for warbling. The main problem with Bangerz, then, isn’t her voice. 

The problem is that these collection of songs – some good, some bad, some utterly horrific, doesn’t have a narrative thread; it all feels terribly disjointed. Does she wanna go all Destiny's Child and be an #IndependentWoman? Does she want to make a whole album about casual sex and how liberated it makes her? Or does she want to sing ballads about failed love? Like a child with ADD, Miley Cyrus seems to want to cover all bases at once. 

In the end, she covers none.

Personally, I prefer the songs where Cyrus tones it down and sings songs about doomed love, as I feel that plays well to her vocal range, and her background in acting suits her delivery of the more heartfelt, dramatic lines, which she belts out with excellent gusto. But she needs to pick a focus for her next outing. 

Bangerz currently plays as a chaotic mishmash of poorly-thought out tunes that may have sounded good in theory, but doesn’t quite work in practice. 

An example, perhaps, of art mirroring the artist’s life.

Grade: D

For more of my album reviews, click here.

Restaurant review: INAMO (Soho)

I had a completely new dining experience on Monday evening in Inamo, a fusion Asian restaurant where the tables have a touchpad on the side, and the table itself serves as a giant screen. From this, you can order food using technology rather than hailing a waiter and omit that awkward small talk. 

In addition to this, you can choose the “ambience” to be projected onto the table, whether it be photos of palm trees or a pattern, as well as play games whilst waiting for your order, be it alone, or with others.

So far, so innovative. Credit to the creators behind this idea, the novelty of it definitely didn’t wear off on me throughout my stay at Inamo, and I would have happily spent even more time exploring all the functions of the interactive table. But my chief reason for attending restaurants has and always will be for the food, and the prices and quantities at this place were nothing short of exorbitant.

For starters, we had three dumplings, which cost £5.75, but they were so small, that you could easily have chomped all three in one bite. Don’t get me wrong, it was wonderfully presented, the sauce was fantastic and the dumpling itself didn’t taste bad either, but nearly six pounds for what was essentially the ingredients of ONE decent sized dumpling, spread out over three, was taking liberties.

The mains weren’t much better. The nigri set was £13.75, and as you can see from the photo, it wasn’t anything more than just eight pieces of sushi. From a supermarket, you could have gotten that for about £4, and even in Wasabi, this would have clocked in less than £7 and tasted just as good. So that was disappointing. 

The Berkshire Pork Neck - the highlight of my dining experience at Inamo -  fulfilled expectations better. Again, quantities weren’t great (the cooks craftily disguised the meat under layers of sauce, giving the appearance of there being more than was actually there), but from the rich taste, you sensed that some thought had actually gone into the inception and preparation of the meal. I don’t usually like pork, but in the blend of spicy chocolate sauce, red wine reduction & crushed wasabi peas sauce that came with it, it tasted wonderful.

The dessert was a strange one. Three different flavours of homemade ice cream was served, to varying degrees of success. They tasted more organic, and thus healthy than that you might get elsewhere, but one of them was far too tangy for my palate, and as such, I couldn’t eat too much of it. The spongy texture also gave me an ill-feeling that it was soap, and not something edible, that I was tucking into.

All this left me unsure of where I stood on Inamo. I did have a great time there, but that was mainly down to the child-like glee the interactrive table bought out in me. The food, however, left a lot to be desired. Only the pork neck actually satiated my appetite; the others, whilst intricately displayed, left me thoroughly disenchanted, not least because there was just so goddamn little of it there. 

Perhaps if they’d spent less time fussing on the tech and took a bit more time thinking about the dishes being offered, I’d actually want to go back there to eat.

Grade: C

For more of my restaurant reviews, click here. If you would like me to review your restaurant, drop me an email at lemon_and_lime7@hotmail.com

Restaurant review: LOCAL FRIENDS (Golders Green)

This week, I started a part-time Masters, the campus of which is in central London. We get 1 ½ hours for lunch breaks, as opposed to the half hour I get at work, which means I have quite some time to kill, exploring London. I like the make optimal use of that time by just hopping off at a random tube stop and ambling to the first restaurant that piques my fancy. 

On Wednesday, it was Golders Green, and a Chinese restaurant just a road across from the station, Local Friends. It was also a lesson, or should that be a re-affirmation, that when it comes to dining out, if it looks too good to be true, that’s because it is.

They advertised a lunchtime deal that boasted a soup, meat and a side dish for £6.80. I thought this sounded great; I love being able to choose a whole “package deal”-type things. And you could choose exactly what meat you wanted, be it chicken/beef/pork, and what type of sauce (eg sweet and sour or black bean sauce). 

However, if you wanted a seafood dish, you’d have to shell out a bit more, which completely goes against the photo they put outside the restaurant, where prawns were featured.

The quality of the food was mixed. For soup, I ordered the hot and sweet sauce, which tasted like pretty much every other one I’ve had in Chinese restaurants; it’s very hard to get wrong, but always tastes wonderful. 

For the main, I had beef in black bean sauce. The sauce was great, but I felt the beef was undercooked, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it was, as the food was laid out for me less than three minutes after I’d ordered it, which did seem like suspiciously swift turnover. As it turned out, it was. Add in the fact that the rice had absolutely nothing going for it, then I’d really have to say the lunch was more miss than hit, with the high point coming at the start with the soup.

The final unpleasant surprise of my Local Friends-going experience was when the bill came. The sign outside the restaurant quite clearly stipulated £6.80. We’ve already touched upon how the photos were misleading because the actual menu excluded prawn. Well, the price itself was yet another lie, because turns out, Local Friends aren’t so friendly after all: they helped themselves to a 10% service charge. That, too, was not on the sign. 

Grade: D

For more of my restaurant reviews, click here. If you would like me to review your restaurant, drop me an email at lemon_and_lime7@hotmail.com

Concert review: ROBIN THICKE (iTunes festival, Roundhouse)

Most recently grabbing headlines due to Miley Cyrus grinding against his crotch, Robin Thicke has really been loving life since the release of his song Blurred Lines, which plays it fast and loose with consent. I must preface this review by saying that I am not at all a fan of his, and we won tickets to go see him in the Metro. Watching Robin Thicke live is not an activity I would normally pay money to do; quite the contrary; you’d have to pay me.

Credit where credit is due, he’s well-dressed enough, coming out in a sharp three-piece suit (the outside of which he took off at one point and threw into a crowd of screaming girls) and aviator sunglasses. But whilst he looked the business, his performance was sadly lacking. Grunting “UH” repeatedly into the microphone as if he was romancing a someone and taking a breather to give the crowd a smarmy speech about how wonderful his life is, does not entertainment make.

Blurred Lines received criticism, in part because of the amount of nude women who pranced about in the uncut music video for it, and the backing singers of Robin Thicke’s performance don’t wear much more – just a croptop and pants to cover their dignity. This wouldn’t be a problem if they actually, you know, sang, but, alas, that they don’t, instead choosing to paw at Thicke, and bend over at suggestive angles for the audience. 

To be fair, the girls don’t do a bad job of what they have to do, it is more the smug gurn Thicke sports throughout the show, obviously feeling that he deserves to be worshipped, oh he of God-like status. This is epitomised in how he will often drag a 3-minute long song to about 10 minutes, but hollering the last three words over, and over, and over, and over again.

A big issue is also that none of Thicke’s songs are all that interesting, catchy, or just good. Thicke tried to engage the audience in his slower, more heartfelt love songs, but the lyrics of them were so generic that they simply felt cheesy. 

Magic was probably his best song, a passable blend of catchy jazz and lovey-dovey schmaltz, but I forgot the names of all the other songs he sang. He even wheels out the piano to show that he’s a #musician at one point, but it’s a lost cause really. This man epitomises slimey, and unless you somehow find that sexy in a man, you’ll do nothing in this other than roll your eyes repeatedly at him performing live.

Grade: E

Bar review: LONGITUDE 0°8' AT LE MÉRIDIEN (Piccadilly Circus)

Following the success that was two people being wined and dined, very well, for £29 on a deal I’d bought off LivingSocial, I developed a fondness for package deals off the internet, and thus bought another one, this time off Wowcher. 

The deal cost £17, which for “four cocktails and six canapés”, sounded too good to be true. Well, it was, in that it played very slyly on the fact that humans make assumptions. It was, quite literally, 4 cocktails, and 6 canapés. Not six plates, just six. I’d assumed that it would be six plates, but, as we all know, ASSUME makes an ASS of U and ME.

Fortunately, we’d had a big-ass lunch so even the smallest portions of canapés managed to feed us, and, whilst I skipped the ham sandwiches (I don’t like ham), the cheese and pesto bite was delicious. The cocktails, less so. They were all extremely strong. This is usually a trait I encourage in cocktails, as the ones they serve in Slug and Lettuce are usually entirely soft drink, with about ½ a shotglass worth of alcohol in it. 

Even I, being a big lightweight, would find it hard to get drunk on that. Yet they don’t taste bad at all, because of the lack of alcohol. The Longitude 0°8' cocktails went the opposite way – there was alcohol alright, but due to the lack of flavouring, fruits and sweetners, it pretty much felt like we were drinking pure vodka. Not pleasant.

I feel massively cheated by the fact that there were just six tiny little canapés, and not, as I’d dreamed in my head, six plates of them. But that’s slightly my problem, I should have looked at the £17 pricetag and realised not to be greedy. So the majority of my money went on the cocktails, then. But they were not good. 

Add in the fact that because Longitude 0°8' was an “upmarket” place and thus they can’t have their punters being too comfy, the sofas were rigid and unwelcoming. The woman who served us looked like she’d rather not be there. Oh, and the clientele were the biggest selection of hoity-toity goons I’d ever seen. (Then again, with an RRP of £14.50 for one of those disgusting cocktails, you’d have to have more money than sense to go here.) 

When it comes to pretention, this place would give Laduree a run for its money. Avoid.

Grade: F

For more of my bar reviews, click here. If you would like me to review your bar, drop me an email at lemon_and_lime7@hotmail.com

Dessert review: SCOOP (South Kensington)

Before the Chelsea game on Wednesday, I had an amble around neighbouring Tube stations whilst waiting to meet a friend. I was feeling a bit peckish, but not hungry enough for a full meal, so when I saw Scoop, a luxury ice cream place, my curiosity was piqued and I helped myself to three scoops.

Of the three, two were roaring successes (the cherry and the fruit sorbet flavour), and the third, biscuit, whilst not exactly to my taste palate, was still specked with crushed biscuits, which gave them an interesting texture nonetheless. But, as said, the other two were wonderful, and they definitely tasted high-end. 

It's pretty hard to go wrong with ice cream as it as so I was going to be satisfied either way, but it was refreshing to be in a place in South Ken that didn't rest purely on its laurels of the upmarket location, but, rather, strove to make its food as classy as the postcode.

Grade: A