The Tasteless Melodic Verbosity of “Green light” and “Liability”
Three years ago, Lorde stunned us with her marvelously haunting debut EP “Pure Heroine”, a soft and magically precise miracle that flagged Lorde as one of the most distinctive, utterly complex and eloquent crooners in Art Pop. It’s been three years since she took a long vacation from independent music. A week ago on March 1 she cheerily announced on her Twitter account that her fist single “Green Light” would be coming out the next day. Today, she released a single: “Liability” a track which will form part of her second studio album “Melodrama.” (Out July 16). As with ‘Pure Heroine’ reactions to her first pieces of music after three years have been largely favorable, with critics lauding her for her eclectic mix of melody and her powerful vocal performances. But, it is easy to fall into a diabolically forced rhythm that employs soft and fierce piano cords to draw away hints from its tastelessly showy attempt at purgation.
Much of the melodic energies that governed “Pure Heroine” is continued in “Green Light”. If any variances emerge, they are subtle and overshadowed by Lorde’s overpowering brand of electric Indie pop. Much like her previous work, she produces with fierce synthesizers and echoed shouts. Thematically, “Green Light” duplicates, and almost parodies “Pure Heroine”. If “Pure Heroine” was an intimate conversation between a privileged white teen girl and her therapist, “Green Light” is a re-union, in the sense that, nothing has changed: Lorde is still precariously carefree yet heartbroken, still possesses an eccentric zest for life, but occasionally curls up and cries. In the end, what ensues on her latest tracks is an empty exertion of teenage frivolity, a misleading instruct to freedom, and an uninspiring attempt to engender an emotional reaction that — lyrically — is both nauseating and grotesque in conveying her sensibilities.
The reason “Green light” and “Liability” are so popular amongst critics is the same reason it will be infamous amongst avid Indie enthusiasts: Lorde has proved herself to be a thoroughly predictable highly structured artiste. Critics exalt tradition, hippies want to be mystified. Much of Indie and Art pop favor a radical deviation of meter, pace, structure and sound, yet Lorde, ever eager to identify with the provisions of pop, refuses to surprise us and resists the urge to shock.
In “Green Light” the pace is a hurried flutter of Lorde’s frantic voice, in the first few seconds; her voice is the instrument, and it opens up into a chorus of whispered hollers, at the bass line, it is supplanted by an overarching mood of ascending piano chords. For the rest of the track, heavy kilter snare drums, electrically charged beats and trumpeting sirens accompany her husky shouts. It’s almost like a bonus track to “Pure Heroine”, it assumes the same temperament, attempts to dazzle, but fails to inspire. On this track, Lorde’s brand of hasty spiky vocal expression seems to have expired and rendered her sound a slave to musical palaver.
In Pop, anything — no matter how subtle — out of the ordinary will daze and delight us. Consider Maggie Robert’s hurried sense of urgency on her hit track “Alaska” or Ruth B’s wondrously stylistic nod at adventure and eccentricity in “Lost Boys” a piano driven ballad on the wonders of being lost in strange mental terrains. “Liability” a soft folk composition propelled by lonely piano chimes is another failed attempt assert pathos, for the main reason that, Lorde’s dicta — used to disseminate the ideas of sentiment and heartache — is a histrionic mawkish emote. The metaphors — when they arrive — come off as languid and unimaginative. “The truth is that I’m a toy that people enjoy/till all of the tricks don’t work anymore/and then they are bored of me” Lorde chirps. Is this not absurd? There are richer, purpler, more genuine ways to convey grief without holding lyrics up to the same standards as a nursery rhyme and making it appear so whimsical.
Lorde’s musical range is limited, and her attempt to create peculiar expressionism has transmuted into sound that is not only less affecting but less forceful. Both “Green light” and “Liability” feel like a lesson taught several times, and thoroughly over flogged, so that we are forced to reject the very musical premise that Lorde has struggled so hard to establish. This time, the lesson is delivered not in close proximity to the audience, but reverberated from far away balconies and mountaintops. The stories do not appear real to us, her manner is animated but empty. A philosophically dense message, a spiraling lesson, is what gives Indie pop the power to be memorable and both “Green Light” and “Liability” beg to be forgotten.
Music is an interdependent relationship. The singer depends on the listener for validation, the listener looks towards the singer for a feeling of kinship. Whatever the conditions are, wherever we go, sound has the power to be affecting, simply because, music arrives free of circumstance. However we experience sound: from an old phonograph sitting in a musty basement crying over old pictures, music tinkering from an ice-cream truck, or through your dentists satellite radio station during a routine check-up, we deposit a part of ourselves in that sound. There are still traces of my being lodged within the chords of Brahms, the jaunty guitar work of David Bowie, or even the playful rap of Young Thug. That is the essence of music, to give a part of ourselves back to an artist that has given us so much. In Lorde’s case, she gives and gives and gives, but somehow manages to leave us intact.
