The last few years have been intriguing ones for pop. As noted in a recent Guardian piece, a new wave of writers has emerged, rightly determined to overturn the longstanding critical bias against the genre. Under their influence, pop has been freighted with great sociopolitical import, its stars recast not as marionettes at the mercy of the music industry but as auteur figures. Under the circumstances, you can see why Camila Cabello has talked up the follow-up to her platinum-selling solo debut as something more than a mere collection of songs. “I was very intentional about the world I was creating,” she told one fashion magazine. “I made mood boards, I brought posters into the studio to set the vibe. It was the first time I’d done something like that.” What did the mood boards show, wondered the interviewer. “Lots of people kissing,” offered Cabello.
If you think there’s a certain bathos in that statement, or that it’s not strictly necessary for a pop star to intentionally create a world, make mood boards, etc, to record an album of love songs, then you haven’t been paying close attention to the gossip rags. Romance’s arrival was trailed by Señorita, a bit of beach bar-friendly summer fluff that went to No 1 on both sides of the Atlantic. It offered the Latin pop of Cabello’s fantastic 2017 single Havana – a breakthrough smash that smartly underlined her Cuban roots – viewed through a Vaseline-smeared lens. The hook was an inescapable ear worm, but you did wonder how on earth it needed eight songwriters – including Charli XCX and one member of Clean Bandit – to come up with something so insubstantial. No matter: its success was bolstered by widespread speculation about whether Cabello and Shawn Mendes, her duet partner and video co-star, were actually at it in real life. In the ensuing months, every cameraphone-captured public snog, every soppy Instagram message and every hot denial that the relationship was a publicity stunt has been breathlessly reported. Under the circumstances, Cabello announcing that her new album is about love counts as a canny move. If the public are going to pruriently speculate about your private life, then why not play on it?
Anyone in search of salacious titbits regarding the Cabello/Mendez hook-up is going to go home hungry. We learn that Mendes is a vast improvement on Cabello’s last partner, of whom more later, but the lyrics stick largely to generalisations of the “Got me beggin’ you for more” variety, peppered with proclamations of undying love, some of which are confusingly expressed. “When you touch me,” she cries on Living Proof, “paint me like a Van Gogh.” Dressed as a 19th-century Belgian peasant? Smoking a pipe? Eating a potato?
The music, meanwhile, dials down the Latin inflections of her debut, although there’s some flamenco-styled guitar and handclapping here and there, and fizzy Carlos Santana-ish soloing on Should’ve Said It, a track with a melody indebted to En Vogue’s Don’t Let Go. Everywhere else, Romance wheels out the current pop bag of tricks, from Sia-esque soaring choruses to field recordings of West African singing.
Sometimes this approach works really well. Shameless is an exercise in mounting tension that slowly builds from an opening inspired by the xx and never quite explodes into the balls-out arena rock you expect. My Oh My enlists North Carolina rapper DaBaby for three minutes of campy 1950s horror-movie soundtrack fun, replete with sampled screams. And the album can be dazzling in its ruthless sense of purpose: the closing First Man is an effective tearjerker in which a new bride addresses her father, which may well end up where it clearly wants to be, as a staple of wedding dances.
Sometimes, however, the songwriting is just so-so. Bad Kind of Butterflies slips in one ear and out of the other, leaving no trace; Liar is a attempt to meld mariachi horns with the tinny Euro-reggae of Ace of Base, a cocktail that is no more appetising in practice than it looks on paper. You may find yourself questioning some of the production choices, not least the decision to use Auto-Tune not as a special effect but as a kind of cure-all lotion slathered over every syllable that passes Cabello’s lips. After a while, it becomes distracting and counter-productive: a cyborg sheen on what are ostensibly heartfelt songs of burgeoning new love.
On Easy, Cabello contrasts said new love with her previous relationship: “I always thought I was hard to love until you made it seem so easy.” There’s a certain knife-twisting wit there, given that her previous relationship was with a self-styled relationship guru, the implication being that “the world’s leading dating advice expert for women”, as his YouTube channel bills him, may want to reconsider how much of a world-leading expert he is. Of course, you need to know the backstory to get the full effect. But then, it’s difficult to imagine anyone who buys Romance not knowing the backstory: that’s rather the point, the means by which a flawed album seems destined for smash-hit status.
This week Alexis listened to
Paul Weller – In Another Room
It’s worth considering for a moment how unlikely the idea of Paul Weller releasing an EP of musique concrète experimentation on a leftfield electronic label would once have seemed. The results are appealingly eerie.
