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Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft review – more soft than hard
22
May

A compelling tale of love and loss, Hit Me Hard and Soft sees Eilish embrace her sexuality on her own terms via knotty and unpredictable pop. The love songs are delectable and the showpiece moments titanic, although not every sonic experiment comes off.

There’s something admirable in the way Eilish casts aside any hint of lyrical subtlety in Lunch, the second track of her hotly anticipated third studio album, Hit Me Hard And Soft. “You need a seat, I’ll volunteer,” is one of the song’s many innuendos that will have no doubt raised an eyebrow when Eilish first presented it to her long-time producer and brother Finneas O’Connell. Eilish has long been known for resisting the sexualisation of young female pop stars that music executives seem to demand, gaining fame for her concealingly baggy oversized outfits. Her song Not My Responsibility, one of many Eilish tracks discussing body image, was an eerie spoken word piece about the demands of ogling magazines and relentless commentators. She was furious last year when Variety outed her as bisexual in a cover story, disappointingly still deemed a newsworthy reveal even in 2024. In Eilish’s words: “I like boys and girls leave me alone about it please literally who cares.”

For that reason, Lunch is a triumphant reclaiming of the narrative – Eilish’s first song explicitly about sex, and one not coy about mentioning the lover in question happens to be a girl. But beneath all the titillating euphemisms (“I could eat that girl for lunch”), there’s plenty of the singer’s trademark lyrical depth. The metaphor of eating has deep, dark connotations for Eilish and many of her young female fans, many of whom will have grappled with body dysmorphia and anorexia in today’s world of impossibly perfect Instagram models. Eilish’s sexual liberation nourishes her in the same way the unwarranted opinions of mass media starve her. “People say I look happy just because I got skinny / But the old me is still me […] and I think she’s pretty,” Eilish reflects movingly on Skinny, this album’s tender tone setter, a song which sounds like stepping into a warm bath after a long day.

Much of Hit Me Hard And Soft’s brilliance lies in Eilish’s uncanny ability to transform the complex feelings of young love and newly explored sexuality with a judicious synth choice or telling melodic turn. Album highlight Birds of a Feather, for instance, sounds every bit as unsustainably beautiful as a young love affair, Eilish singing with an unrestrained belt that sounds a far cry from the close-up whispers that made her famous. The washed out chords and sickly sweet melodies sound straight out of a Wham! classic, complete with a shimmering bassline and reverb-soaked vocals. For a singer who gained fame through tracks with names like You Should See Me In a Crown and All the Good Girls Go to Hell, Birds of a Feather is a shockingly lovely song that heralds an impressive sonic reinvention for Eilish.

Elsewhere, it’s not the complexities of fresh love that Eilish summons, but revenge. The Diner recalls an operation to break into her enemy’s kitchen via a plodding synth bass and distorted layered vocals that recall the Bad Guy days, albeit without any of the world-dominating hooks. A more compelling wander to the dark side comes on Chihiro, a track propelled by a disgustingly funky bass line that provides a muscular match to Eilish’s intimate vocal delivery. “Did you take my love away from me?” she demands as a swirl of synths begin to envelop her, successfully finding beauty amidst pained lovesickness. The track culminates in a compelling plot twist (“it’s all been a trap”) and a subsequent wall of electronic sound, although the payoff compares unfavourably to the same trick Parcels pulled off in their deeply underrated opus Everyroad.

Unusually for an A-league pop star, Eilish released no singles in the lead up to Hit Me Hard and Soft’s release, and her uninterrupted playing of the album in a listening party at New York’s Barclay Center last week suggested she sees this album as a single work, rather than a collection of potential chart hits. Indeed, Hit Me Hard and Soft is Eilish’s most narratively cohesive album to date, beginning with an ecstatic love affair and ending just as the heartbreak is beginning to numb. The cinematic turning point comes with The Greatest, a remarkable five-minuter in which Eilish’s pent up rage eventually erupts over arena-filling rock. “All the times I’ve waited / For you to want me naked,” she laments, but there’s a hint of self-deprecating irony in the conclusion that “man, am I the greatest”.

The self-deception continues in L’amour de ma vie, in which Eilish attempts to convince herself it was never love in the first place over a catchy pop hook. Again, Eilish’s anger bubbles to the surface in the song’s second half, although this time it’s via Hit Me Hard and Soft’s most contentious left turn: a pummelling four-to-the-floor kickdrum and, improbably, the sort of heavily autotuned Eurodance groove Finland might consider sending to Eurovision next year. Eilish has to be given points for her vagrant disregard for the pop rulebook, but her defeatist wails of “it’s over now” inevitably get lost in the silliness of it all.

A trendier synthy confection leads into the closing track, Blue, which features the sort of devastatingly catchy earworm a lesser artist could have quite happily used as the linchpin for a straightforwardly appealing three minute pop song. Instead, Eilish gives us a final creative flourish by turning the tempo right down and reflecting on how we tend to feel attraction to those who share our flaws. In the process, she deftly ties up many of the album’s lyrical loose threads, throwing in the beautiful strings melody that opened the album for good measure.

That said, for all Hit Me Hard and Soft’s thoughtful narrative and restless creativity, the 43 minutes do leave a lingering feeling that the most exciting elements of Eilish’s previous compositions – the body horror and masterful production of Bury a Friend or the apocalyptic finale of Happier Than Ever – are left largely unexplored in this introspective album, and bursts of experimentation are only pursued for a few wild minutes before a return to Eilish’s default spacey electropop. With its unapologetic queer love songs and impeccably nuanced lyricism, Hit Me Hard and Soft is a significant development in Eilish’s albumcraft, but there’s still a sense her best album is yet to come.

Maggie Rogers: Don’t Forget Me review – assured third album brims with singalong choruses
24
Apr

The ballads are few and far between on Maggie Rogers’ brilliantly written third record, which delivers one singalong belter after another. Don’t Forget Me doesn’t reinvent the singer-songwriter wheel, but what a fabulous wheel this particular album is.

The origin story of Maryland singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers’ career is the stuff of pop legend these days. Rogers was 22 when she took a music production masterclass at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, which involved the no doubt intimidating task of playing an original song to one of the most famous producers in the world, Pharrell Williams. The song, Alaska, floored Williams, who’s first response was “I have zero, zero notes for that.” The resulting clip went viral (a remarkable watch still available on YouTube), and the rest is history.

History, because Williams really had discovered a US megastar in that small New York recording studio. Just four years later, Rogers would be at the Grammys. This year, that shy music student has a 30-date US stadium tour in her diary, followed by a tour of Europe in support of a little-known British band by the name of Coldplay. Whilst Alaska remains one of her biggest hits, Rogers’ music these days sounds much removed from the crowd pleasing yet safe pop confections of her 2019 debut, Heard It In a Past Life. Don’t Forget Me feels like the completion of the gradual artistic progression that Rogers launched on that fateful day back in 2016, developing from cautious experimentalism to self-assured pop and country hits. That’s not to say Don’t Forget Me tries anything especially distinctive or unusual, but the bulletproof vocal performances and a string of anthemic choruses don’t put a foot wrong.

Spacey, mature opener It Was Coming All Along is an effective tone-setter, but it’s the moody follow up where the instant classics begin: Drunk is a thrilling ride with bluesy rock guitars and a relentless chorus that recalls Fleetwood Mac at their most dynamic. Best of all is the extraordinary vocal performance, which rattles along with so much pent-up rage there are moments when Rogers’ sounds on the verge of losing control completely. And yet, like a cowboy clinging onto to a raging bull’s leash, she just about lands every adventurous adlib, and the result is one of the most compelling pop-rock recordings of the year so far.

Drunk is just the beginning of Don’t Forget Me’s delights. Deeply lovely So Sick of Dreaming is graced with sparkling layered guitars and a stunningly harmonised chorus that paints Rogers’ lovesickness with a beautiful elongated sigh of a melody. The spoken recount of a failed first date during the bridge may strike some as corny, but the payoff is perfectly executed final chorus that epitomises Rogers’ general fatigue whilst hinting at an underlying hope. The Kill maintains that appealing concoction of pain with a dash of optimism, the latter provided by an winning mellotron hook and galloping groove. It’s a straightforward and arguably unambitious track – a smattering of horns could have been a more daring creative decision to take The Kill even further from bland country music charts fodder – but it’s hard to knock the sheer quality of Rogers’ songcraft.

There are only two ballads in the ten tracks – I Still Do and All the Same – both of which are competently written and necessary moments of quiet reflection, but it’s the stadium-ready up-tempo numbers that will have fans returning to Don’t Forget Me over and over again. Earwormy On & On & On, for instance, pairs a wobbling synth bass with snappy funk drums, a hark back to noughties which might have outdated had Rogers’ hooks not been so punchy. Most of Don’t Forget Me’s choruses seem tailormade for road trip singalongs, particularly the anthemic Never Going Home, as well as the poignant lead single and title track, which closes the album with a pained demand to be remembered. If she’s in any way trying to send a message to listeners at the end of her album, Rogers need not worry – no listener is forgetting this excellent record in a hurry.

Jade Bird: Burn the Hard Drive EP review – restrained breakup songs lack punch
12
Apr

Jade Bird’s knack for an anthemic chorus and soaring vocals go largely unused on this mixed EP, which opts for introspective healing over the roof-raising Americana of Bird’s first two albums.

Jade Bird was born in Croydon, but she has an American soul. Her folky songs and penetrating vocals have long had the biggest popularity in the country music-obsessed southern states of the US, and her career was forged on the awesome country rock choruses of her self-titled debut, a record which included, amongst other barnstormers, Love Has All Been Done Before, a song which saw Bird rightly indulge in two bridges and four choruses – each more explosive than the last. A move to Austin, Texas in 2021 was the inevitable next step, along with sophomore record Different Kinds of Light, which put a loved-up sheen on Bird’s earthy Americana and offered more signs of songwriting maturity and nuance, not least in the glorious, sun-kissed melodies of Now is the Time, one of the very best songs of that year.

The years since has seen another significant change in Bird’s circumstances with the end of the long-term relationship behind many of Different Kinds of Light’s sweetest moments. The result is a long-teased EP which sees Bird mellower, more pensive and less inclined to throw in a straightforwardly anthemic chorus just for the hell of it. The unlikely production credit of Guernsey electronic music artist Mura Masa signifies the shift away from gunslinging country bangers, although (thankfully) his influence is most felt on the EP’s tasteful, muted bass riffs, rather than any drum machines and synths.

The trouble with Burn the Hard Drive is that heartbreak has not stoked the fire of Bird’s already fiery compositions, but rather extinguished it. The opening title track is pleasant and competently produced but sounds colourless compared to the unadorned passion of Bird’s early songs. There’s an interesting bass line and thoughtful one-note chorus, but for a voice of Bird’s calibre it’s like taking a Ferrari to work. C.O.M.P.L.E.X possesses the EP’s best earworm, but Bird’s admonishments of her ex’s “God complex” sound out of place amongst gentle guitars and weeping violins. There’s more intelligent composition and another alluring bass line in You’ve Fallen in Love Again, but it’s all washed in a spaced-out reverb that blunts the sharper edges in Bird’s melodies and vocals and renders the song as forgettable as a dream.

C’est La Vie is the first glimpse of Bird’s rasping vocals in their full glory and features a textbook Bird chorus that demands to be sung at full volume whilst driving towards the sunset on a long road trip. Again, Bird stops short of the full country rock treatment of wailing guitars and pounding drums, but a stripped-back, acoustic guitar driven rendition offers a round-the-campfire authenticity that spotlights Bird’s winning chorus. The song sets up Breaking the Grey, an optimistic finish with a somewhat obvious gospel-tinged piano progression. “You can’t wish the feelings away,” Bird admits, in a small but pleasing narrative arc after the desperation she felt to erase the past in the opening track. “I finally feel like I’m breaking the grey,” she assures us in the end. It seems Burn the Hard Drive has been a necessary, healing songwriting exercise for Bird – let’s hope for album three she’s ready to return to the full-blooded rock and roll she delivers best.

Jacob Collier: Djesse Vol. 4 review – his most gloriously incohesive yet
15
Mar

Ticking off everything from electropop to metal, Indian folk music to club-ready dance numbers, the finale of Collier’s four-album extravaganza is eclectic even by his standards. It makes for a mightily impressive listen, even if the 26 featured artists might overwhelm even his keenest fans.

Now five albums into his career, it’s clear Jacob Collier is a once-in-generation musician. For anyone that’s been following him since he broke out via harmonically complex a capella covers on YouTube, that’s old news. In reality, it was clear from that very first album – Hideaway, toured solo with Jacob jumping around stage from drums to keys to double bass with the help of a loop pedal – that Collier isn’t like your average singer-songwriter, not even your average jazz musician. He plays everything brilliantly and effortlessly, all with Herculean powers of humility, and has an immense grasp of musical harmony in all its nuances. His insatiable urge to learn new instruments is matched by his appetite for a dizzying array of genres and a rare respect for music in all its nebulous forms: Djesse Vol. 4 has everything from choral ambience to cinematic pop and oppressive death metal – and that’s just track one. As a result, Djesse Vol. 4 is in turns awe-inspiringly virtuosic and discombobulating, as has Collier’s entire career up to this point.

This record, the final of a blockbuster four album cycle and the hardest of the four to pin down to one sonic palette, starts with Collier’s finest USP of recent years: the “100,000-person choir”. 2020’s Vol. 3 was followed by a world tour in which Collier perfected the art of ‘playing the audience’, orchestrating soul-stirring three part harmonies with hand gestures, often with improvisatory flourishes. Vol. 4‘s opener presents an astonishing overlay of audience recordings from every single concert on that tour (which means Undertone‘s voice is technically on this album too – there goes my impartiality). Moreover, 100,000 Voices is much more than just the heart-warming harmonies many Collier fans will have expected; soon Collier’s singing an up tempo pop anthem with an unusually unrestrained belt, a refreshing change from his usual choir boy undertones). He cuts through the chaos with a striking demand to “let me be happy! … let me be ordinary!” but alas, as with many a Collier song that has come before, he gets bored quickly, and soon he’s throwing in a distinctly unhappy and unordinary death metal interlude apparently just because he can.

There’s plenty of impatience elsewhere, but Collier’s core ideas are consistently solid. She Put Sunshine has a restlessly shifting electropop groove but a bulletproof hook and touchingly romantic lyrics at its heart; A Rock Somewhere is an utterly random yet atmospheric sitar interlude; in the other extreme, Witness Me features the definition of the Western pop mainstream in Shawn Mendes, and turns out to be a somewhat cheesy gospel pop number with a catchy chorus.

A common sonic thread is impossible to find in Djesse Vol. 4, but the record stands out in Collier’s discography by the unusually high number of actually comprehensible pop and rock songs. Lead single WELLLL debuted at Glastonbury and offered false promises of an incoming rock album, but it still includes impressively hard-hitting classic rock riffs for a musician that grew up singing Bach chorales in the living room with his family. Cinnamon Crush and Wherever I Go are both sumptuous R&B cuts, the latter containing a standout vocal performance from gravel-throated Clyde Lawrence. There’s also several much needed islands of calm. Little Blue, featuring a non-descript performance from Brandi Carlile, is serene to the point of being soporific. Summer Rain, instead, is the pick of the ballads, Collier showcasing the depths of his lovesick tenderness before a soaring, delightfully uncomplicated finale that evokes Coldplay in Fix You mode. It’s more proof that when Collier can successfully harness his immense talents into developing a single strong idea – like the Hulk trying not to smash everything he holds – the result can be stunning.

One gripe I’ve had of Collier’s albums so far is that he has an unfortunate habit of making the best song a cover. An orchestral All Night Long and a towering choral rendition of Moon River were the clear highlights of their respective albums, and a piano cover of Dancing Queen performed live in Stockholm remains on of the most affecting corners of Collier’s released discography. I’ve even made the claim that Collier is yet to create a genuinely great original composition, beyond perhaps Hideaway. Djesse Vol. 4 sets that right, but also includes another extravagant cover in Bridge Over Troubled Water, which foregrounds Tori Kelly’s extraordinary vocals. Unfortunately, the ample flourishes – namely Kelly’s bewilderingly ornate melismas – muddy the picture somewhat, and by the end it seems Collier has chosen showy vocal acrobatics over the simple beauty of the exceptionally well-written source material. Exceptional talent is useful at the right moment, but Bridge Over Troubled Water is an example of Collier’s difficulty in knowing where to practice restraint.

Given this album marks the end of the 44-song long Djesse series, Collier can at least be forgiven for indulging in a grand finale. Two-parter Box of Stars is the most Collier-esque piece he has ever produced, with each distinctive new guest vocalist wheeled in and out at a rate of knots. The result is, as Collier has admitted, utterly unperformable, since the guests’ rap verses and vocal flourishes are far too idiosyncratic for Collier to attempt, particularly given the variety of languages on display (Djesse Vol. 4 boasts featured artists from all seven continents – except Antarctica, but Collier claimed in an interview that there’s recording of Antarctic ice somewhere deep in the mix for good measure). Box of Stars Pt. 1 does at least boil down into a pulsating, hooky dance groove, although Collier only teases out four bars of it in its fully glory at the end of the song.

The very end of the Djesse experience, however, is a wonderful surprise. World O World is a choral hymn and nothing more – without even the drastic harmonic left turns that populate the many of Collier’s earlier choral pieces. Delivered with a gentle majesty akin to Hark! the Herald Angels Sing, the song is a poignant call to leave home and strive for something frightening and new. “Time is swift to come to pass / Nothing stays and nothing lasts,” the choir intones in buttery harmony, sounding not dissimilar to the a capella arrangements that launched 17-year-old Collier’s career in the first place. It’s a simple message, but it’s also perhaps the most deeply moving set of lyrics Collier has ever penned. As this anarchic album comes to a close with a final “goodbye”, all that’s left to wonder is just how Collier has found the time to attain such technical mastery in so many genres.

“When you become immersed in something that you care about in a deep, deep way, it doesn’t feel like practice any more,” Collier tells me, my friend Thomas and a few hundred others in a rammed Wardrobe on a Thursday night in Leeds. We’re here for an underpublicised album launch celebration, and in a Q&A section of a typically remarkable Jacob Collier gig. Surely the diminutive stage at the Wardrobe has never seen a performer of this calibre before. If four Grammys aren’t enough to go by (and the only time a British artist has won Grammys for all their first four albums), Collier soon provokes gasps by somehow playing guitar and piano simultaneously, this time without a loop pedal in sight. Later, he indulges in the musically literate crowd (he asks later to discover almost half of the audience attends Leeds Conservatoire), conducting his trademark audience choir, with added polyrhythmic clapping and impromptu covers. Constrained (mostly) to one instrument at a time, Collier’s renditions are far less overwhelming than the studio recordings, and melodies on some of Djesse Vol. 4‘s weaker tracks soon reveal their true beauty

Jacob Collier played to a rapt Wardrobe in Leeds.

What’s more, Collier is just an inspiring a speaker as musician. He has a knack of giving profound answers to tedious, surface level questions. For example, a somewhat technical question about harmonic dissonance (one of several such questions from a crowd hungry for just one percent of this genius’s powers) becomes a discussion on finding perspective in life. “Sometimes you might play one note over a chord and think ‘well that note doesn’t go at all’, but it’s not the note that’s wrong, it’s the chord. Whilst you can’t control the world’s ‘notes’, we can control the context within which we place those notes. We get to decide what matters. Music is a very great teacher.” Some may accuse nerdy young musicians of being in a Jacob Collier cult, but it’s hard not to become a convert when hearing him speak so eloquently about his life’s passion.

I’m not the first to want to put Collier’s music back in a box, to dream of a pop song with a verse and a chorus, or a jazz album that focuses on Collier’s seasoned piano improvisation skills, perhaps even an orchestral symphony. The wonderful thing about Collier is that he couldn’t care less. His stated, noble goal of Djesse was to simply experiment and learn about as much music as possible, recruiting world experts from T Pain to Anoushka Shankar, Chris Martin to Xhosa lyricist Kanyi Mavi, and the eclectic volatility of the resulting songs seem to indicate he has achieved his goals. Any Grammys that come along the way are nice bonuses. Later in the gig, one audience member asks him how to be successful, to which Collier advises the best measure of success is simply “contentment”. His best single piece of practical advice? “Don’t try to be cool, be warm.”