Album: Lava La Rue - Starface

Two of the biggest trends in 21st century pop culture today have been “poptimism” – broadly, the idea that pop as such is as serious and worthy of analysis as any other artform – and a kind of everything-everywhere-all-at-once telescoping of past influences into a grab bag of total availability.

The former tendency has rather clotted into received wisdom (fuelled by click addiction) that bigger is better and Taylor Swift therefore deserves more critical attention than anyone else. The latter – though it has led to plenty of interesting lanes of subcultural scholarship – is often derided for causing cultural glutting and a failure of progress.

Twenty-six-year-old Latvian-British-Jamaican Londoner Lava La Rue has no time for any of these complications and entanglements, though, and creatively harks back to a time when these themes were new and exciting. On their debut album, LLR channels a time when they were still at primary school: the mid-Noughties when downloading was still new, as was the thrill of having access to the past and the world on tap, when N*E*R*D and MIA and Britney and Klaxons and Marina And The Diamonds and Destiny’s Child and LCD Soundsystem and CSS and Lil Mama and Friendly Fires seemed to operate more or less on the same plane. Pop thrills and leftfield excitement flowed together naturally.

The 17 songs here are fundamentally pop, with a funk/soul chassis, but there’s no sense that any genre convention can hold them. There’s new wave, psychedelia, hip hop, electropop, disco, R&B all in the mix, but it never feels like those things are being tapped into because of any nerdy interest or because they’re cool, but just because the creative process is swimming in a pool of them all together and its entire natural to absorb them. There’s hook after hook after hook – actually in the spectacular playing as much as the sung choruses – and the songs will get right under your skin after a couple of listens. Maybe it gets a bit bloated towards the end when things get a bit lighter-waving indie-rock, but then the swooning closer “Celestial Destiny” pulls it all back and you want to hit play all over again. A record of spectacular ambition, that is delightful in its re-igniting of the idea of pop as a chaotic, mad patchwork.

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@joemuggs

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