Abbey Shaw checks out Katy Perry’s new album and the burning question is…is it an improvement on ‘I binned a cat and I liked it’ or something along those lines:
Bubble-gum pop is not my thing. My friends so often complain that all of the music I listen to is nothing more than an incessant drone. Most of the time, I like it that way. There are, rare occasions when something so catchy and poppy will seep into my consciousness that, for a brief blip in time, I will agree that mainstream pop can be brilliant, leaving my cynicism behind. Katy Perry has most certainly won me over. She is most definitely pop but her powerful vocals and defiant attitude do give her an edge.
For lack of a better word, I think “fun” is the only way to describe this album. And going by the lyrics of Last Friday Night, (“Yeah we danced on table tops/And we took to many shots/Think we kissed but I forgot.”) Ms Perry knows how to have a good time. Most will already have heard singles such as California Girls and Teenage Dream which are all, in their own right, brilliant to dance to on a night out. There is, however, another level to this album which can be heard in more subdued tracks such as “Pearl” and closing track “Not Like the Movies”, the latter featuring a softer side to Katy’s voice which overlays a particularly pretty piano melody that will hopefully gain Katy Perry some credibility as a musician from even the most sceptical of listeners.
Although this album cannot exactly be described as a progression from previous album One of the Boys, I feel that there was no need for it to have done so. Katy Perry is spot on when it comes to catchy, popular music and so I say she should keep doing what she is doing. In the most wonderfully manufactured and unashamedly auto-tuned way, she has created pop perfection. And so, I am asking all of the popular music cynics out there to give this a listen.
