Nick Bollinger discusses the lockdown disco of dance pop icon Dua Lipa; a credible comeback from New York City rockers the Strokes; and the travellers’ tales of solitary guitarist M. Ward.
Photo: Supplied
Dua Lipa - Future Nostalgia
When Britain went into lockdown the week before Dua Lipa was due to drop her second album, the British pop star considered postponing its release. Was it appropriate - commercially let alone civically - to put out a concept album about partying and getting close when the public message is social isolation? Her answer was almost counter-intuitive: she brought the release forward. And it seems to have worked.
Photo: Supplied
Future Nostalgia is the second album by this 24-year-old London-born daughter of Albanian migrants who is currently the brightest British star in the global pop firmament. The title is both a verbal knot and a literal description of contents. Dua Lipa is making music that in the future will be seen to define this period, and yet it also draws deeply on the past; specifically the dance music of the 80s. With a relentless pulse and spring-loaded bassline, a track like ‘Don’t Stop Now’ is a time tunnel to Danceteria.
Those eager to categorise Dua Lipa as a mere product of the pop assembly line will no doubt point to the number of different producers used on the album. But it’s more a case of them having been handpicked by the singer who, like a curator, has chosen each for the specific contribution she knows they will bring. And the result is an album of remarkably consistency, the common denominate being the indomitable Dua.
Much of the album is like something Madonna might have done around the time of Confessions On A Dancefloor, her own deep dive into disco-retro. And it’s no coincidence that Dua’s collaborator for that track is Stuart Price, who also produced much of Confessions. As a singer she’s more interesting than Madonna, though. Her voice is powerful and precise, with a permanent slight huskiness, as though she’s either been partying or working really hard - I suspect the latter.
How many times can a bassline by INXS or a White Town keyboard riff be recycled? While I have to admit my heart sank when I first heard the White Town lick repurposed in ‘Love Again’ - to me ‘Your Woman’ is a song that was perfect the first time and deserves to be left alone - I guess the real answer to that question should be: as often as you can come up with a new song strong enough to carry it off.
Dua Lipa waits until the very end of the album before she breaks the party vibe, and in ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ - the only song here without a slamming backbeat - she addresses the things women do and then laugh about to hide their fear of male abuse. Yet as she spells out in the choruses ‘there’s nothing funny now.’
The song makes a topical statement, a necessary one, and is another thing that will make Future Nostalgia seem, in the future, a definitive record of the period. But what defines it even more is the stance Dua Lipa takes right from the first song, where she half-raps ‘I know you ain’t used to no female alpha’; and then makes sure we do get used to it, boldly and joyfully, from the beginning to the end of this unapologetic, undeniable dance-pop banger of an album.
The Strokes - The New Abnormal
For a band to have a sound that is identifiably their own is no small achievement - and, although it has been the better part of a decade since we’ve heard anything new from them, I’d have known from the first bars of this track exactly who this is.
Photo: Supplied
It’s the Strokes, as we are immediately reminded by those brittle trebly guitars and the ennui dripping from the voice of Julian Casablancas.
It’s a sound this band established strongly from their first album, Is This It; a sound already so well-formed on that debut that it left them almost immediately between a rock and a hard place. To maintain that sound would lead to self-parody; yet to change would mean sacrificing what they had. And though they maintained momentum through their second and even third albums, they ultimately suffered from both. Now, after a long gap partly filled by the inevitable solo records, they are back, and in many ways have returned to first principles.’Bad Decisions’ could pretty easily have slotted into that classic first album, similarities to Billy Idol notwithstanding.
But some things have changed for this sixth Strokes album, The New Abnormal, and for one there’s a new producer at the helm. That’s Rick Rubin, veteran overseer of everyone from Run D.M.C. to Slayer, but perhaps best known for reviving the recording careers of heritage artists who have lost their way. It was his hand that guided Johnny Cash from the wilderness to the rehabilitated cool of his great American Recordings series; and he damn near did the same for Donovan, Neil Diamond and Black Sabbath.
Rubin’s skill seems to be in identifying the essence of an artist’s voice and then stripping everything back to reveal it. But once that’s been achieved, he will push that artist further, so they ultimately wind up doing things they haven’t done before, whether it is Johnny Cash singing a song like Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Hurt’, or Julian Casablancas singing with more unadorned feeling than I’ve heard from him before on a song like ‘At Your Door’. With big fat polyphonic synths substituting for the usual Strokes guitars, that’s comfortably far from self-parody while still being recognisable as the Strokes. And there’s a surprising amount of keyboard stuff like that on the album. But even when guitarists and Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. wade in with their choppy chords, the vocals remain unusually crisp and upfront.
The Strokes arrival at the turn of the millennium was like the coming of the last great New York City rock’n’roll band. And if that was because, by then, only a bunch of snotty rich kids could afford to be a New York City rock’n’roll band, it didn’t make their swaggering, sneering, apathy-soaked music any less exciting, or authentic. But how apt is it today? When the Twin Towers attacks happened just weeks after that first album hit the stores, causing the band to pull the track ‘New York its Cops’ from the album, they were already acknowledging that attitude without accountability could no longer be the rock’n’roller’s prerogative. The New Abnormal still has plenty of attitude, which Casablancas conveys just with the tone of his voice. If that’s not quite the right attitude for this moment in time, I’m still willing to rank this third - or perhaps even second - best Strokes album there’s been.
M. Ward - Migration Stories
There’s a great song on this album called ‘Hammer and A Nail’ that captures as well as anything I’ve heard, the eerie ambience of a city in lockdown. It’s night and for once there are no cars, and singing in a voice that sounds like he’s either just woken up or else hasn’t slept for days, he looks away from the streets and up towards the sky.
Photo: Supplied
With a melody that harks back to the doo-wop songs of the 50s, M. Ward’s sleepy singing - like a Paul Simon with laryngitis - and his deftly picked guitar, it’s the kind of timeless, atmospheric song he’s been perfecting since his first records, almost twenty years ago. Though his production has quietly become more sophisticated - and this record is in some ways his most sophisticated yet - he’s retained the sense that he’s playing these songs for the first time, his the tape recorder the only audience. And we’re just lucky the recordings have somehow slipped into our hands.
Though this sounds to me like lockdown music, a different theme is spelt out in the album’s title and speaks to other global matters. Migration Stories is the album’s title and, in their impressionistic way, that’s what these songs are. Listen a certain way and you could hear each in of these tracks a different immigrant’s voice, though the cities they sing of, the streets they have wandered and couches where they have made their beds could be any metropolis.
Just occasionally Ward gets a little more geographically specific. His own ancestors came to the United States from Mexico to settle in California, and their journey - along with countless others - is evoked in this song. It’s not just the lyric but the music too, that conjures ‘Westward ho!’ images, with a melody that might have had its origins in some old cowboy ballad.
Outside the solitary intimacy of his solo records, Ward has been a frequent and busy collaborator. With fellow indie songwriter Conor Oberst and My Morning Jacket’s Jim James he’s recorded and toured as Monsters Of Folk, and with singer and actress Zoe Deschanel he’s made sun-drenched Californian pop as She and Him. But for Migration Stories, he’s brought, for the first time, close collaborators into one for his solo projects.
The record was co-produced by Craig Silvey, probably best known for his work with Arcade Fire, and was recorded in Montreal, with Arcade Fire members contributing. And while for much of the album it doesn’t really feel as though Ward has even left his bedroom, there’s a cluster of tunes around the middle of the record where the beat gets bigger, Arcade Fire-ish synths enter the picture, and Ward comes perhaps closer than he ever has to making full-blown pop.While it my have been cut in Quebec, for these tracks it still feels like California, at the end of the western trail, with harmonies that might be ghosts of the Beach Boys.
For the most part, though, it still feels like a solitary journey. And as usual, some of the most evocative moments are when Ward is back in lockdown, at times not even singing, but letting his eloquent guitar tell a story of its own.
