FUXYA

Making good music is not easy. The risk of being a critic is to unavoidably tend to appear overly picky, almost to an offensive extent regarding the effort that artists put in their work, depending on how their product resonates after birth. But, making very bad music is, similarly, not so easy too. In this dishonorable list, some of the basic principles and objective common sense have been ignored, having been replaced with a dose of bad taste and/or sleepy execution, along with insane ideas wildly disguised as avant-garde. #20 Britney Spears   -  Britney Jean  (2013) What should have been her "personal-album" manifesto-type then revealed itself as an inhomogeneous, odd mix of (her) early decade's eurodance night bangers and slower, softer, but equally dull slow tempos. Incapable to show a so coveted heartfelt-ness, Britney Jean is just an extremely tantalizing and confusing record. #19 Alexandra Stan   -  Unlocked  (2014) Wh...

The 2010s will definitely be remembered as a crucial decade by the future generations. It saw the rise of the streaming era which indelibly changed the whole business. Some lines have been crossed and they will never be defined again. Some terms and dichotomies, such as "indie" versus "pop", or "safe" versus "avant-garde", have completely melt in a unintelligible spectrum of concepts, expressions and niches. In an endlessly and wonderfully variegated range of different female artists, I tried my best in order to operate a selection. It was not easy at all: critiquing albums means to evaluate different aspects concurrently, such as quality of production, smartness and effectiveness of arrangements, lyrics expressiveness, amount of creativity, overall cohesiveness. And what is even harder is try to select la crème de la crème among hundreds and hundreds of albums released among a multitude of different genres, statements and artistic interpretat...