Ladyhawke - Wild Things

Pitchfork 57

Ladyhawke’s 2012 album, Anxiety was as much a “difficult sophomore album” as one’s likely to hear this decade: On it, New Zealand-born Philippa “Pip” Brown killed the ‘80s buzz of her debut with prickly pop-punk exploring some of the loneliest and least-fun emotions the human brain concocts. For that, it’s underrated. But it’s understandable that Brown would want to retreat from it, as much for its tepid reception as for her reported state of mind while making it. “I’d never done a sober show in my life until last December,” Brown said; years of chasing social anxiety with alcohol gave way to detox and therapy and the pilgrimage to L.A. all early-to-mid-career musicians take eventually; from it emerged a happier person and, consequentially, a happier album. Who can fault that?

Wild Things announces its shinier, almost-perfectly-happy intentions immediately with “A Love Song,” another entry in the long and usually-pretty-great tradition of unabashed pop songs whose self-referential brightness conceals something dark and whose every line—“you’ve opened my eyes to the oldest tale of time,” “you pull me up and tell me how this could end”—works equally well as love or tragedy. Brown repeats the title to the point of insistence, or even defensiveness, like she’s distracting herself from something dark and unspoken. The ambiguity is crucial; so is the exuberant pop rush.

In abandoning the spikier sound of Anxiety for more straightforward synth-pop, though, Ladyhawke returns to one of the most overcrowded genres going, where thousands vie for maybe a few months of syncs and a lifetime of anonymity. Too much of Wild Things is aimed little higher than that – most audibly on “Golden Girl,” on its polite throb to the Lumineers “hey!”s to the synths that suggest pre-ubiquity La Roux to the distressingly ukulele-like line you can almost smell the lemon Pledge on. It raises two questions: A) whether it’s already in an ad, or just sounds like it’s already in one, via Pavlovian association, and B) whether it’s mistagged and actually by Catey “Brooklyn Girls” Shaw.

“Wild Things” suffers the same; its graceful sweep and confessions so plainspoken (“when you’re almost always lonely, you forget to take it slowly”) mean little when they’re in the service of a Where the Wild Things Are allusion that was dead long before its corpse was fireside-tromped over in the past decade by Spike Jonze and Alessia Cara. It sounds well enough like 2016 and its trends, but it barely sounds like Ladyhawke. (Ladyhawke was ahead of these trends, too—synthpop most obviously, but also “Paris Is Burning,” which if it were released today would fit right into the crowd of disco licks and vaguely house-ish beats.) For every inspired touch—the backing-vocal frisson and ABBA-esque sweep to the melody of “Chills”—there’s an underwritten chorus, or a thin arrangement, or a lyrical complication avoided.

Unsurprisingly, Wild Things’ thorniness, however intermittent, is its best strength. “Let It Roll” has a clattery, deliberately crowded arrangement, guitar tremors off a LoneLady track and Brown’s best vocal mode: tensed-throat stress and tamped-down shyness so fully expressed that they come off as rock-star swagger. Likewise, the disco chorus and New Order synth latticework on “Dangerous” aren’t new, but they at least live up to their title, and to Brown’s older material. But there’s not nearly enough of it. There could have been; before Wild Things, Brown scrapped an entire album that, from press indications, probably sounded a lot like Anxiety; neither she nor the people she said heard it was happy with the results, but one wonders if it was really that bad, or just not commercial and crowd-pleasing enough. Wild Things collapses over the strain to be both.

The Guardian 40

(Mid Century Records)

Best known for My Delirium and Paris Is Burning, the two sulky synthpop singles she released in 2008, on this third album the New Zealand singer-songwriter Pip Brown ditches the brooding for a collection of pop that seems to take the early work of Katy Perry as its main point of reference. It’s that kind of grooveless, flatly bombastic and faintly retro subgenre-dodging pop-pop that even Perry herself has complicated in recent years. Brown may have hooks coming out of her ears – there is no weak link here in terms of infectious choruses, even if most sound uncannily familiar – but that only reinforces the strangely mechanical nature of this record. It feels like an echo chamber for the last five years of anodyne pop, and could have easily been created by a computer tasked with making generic 21st-century chart music. It adds up to a slick and competent, if uninspiring, production.