FUXYA

Gabrielle Aplin's third studio album politely sows in trendy pop terrains where some ambient piano ballads hieratically elevate as trees in a steppe. Until The Sun Comes Up  opens the album with a very tenuous vanilla flavor. The light radio-friendly pop song provides some pleasant night city vibes, but really fails to be memorable or even remotely unique in any kind of way. 6.0/10 Invisible  amplifies the breath of the album. The verses smoothly lay on a sweet pad layering that eventually expand in a fulfilled dreamy chorus vaguely reminescent of Carly Rae Jepsen's fresh 80s influenced teen synthpop.  7.3/10 One Of Those Days is one of the most relaxing songs I've heard in recent time. The piano harmony, and the faint ambient-ish rhythmics fondle your ears through crystalline vocals. The transition from the bridge to the last vented chorus is wonderful as well. There is a neat sense of sonic evolution and morphing that completely takes any sense of boredo...

Halsey's third studio album marks for her a new apogee in terms of versatility and authenticity. Ashley is a promising introduction to the album. The song has an enjoyable evolution and a sophisticated production that manages to enhance the beauty of the lyrical content. The only flaw detectable is the amount of vocal distortion in the chorus, slightly going out of the atmo set. But I'm being very picky. 8.4/10 Clementine is characterized by a lovely Keith Kenniff-like ambient instrumental, that sadly becomes redundant due to the track length and the lack of sonic additions. Again, the emotional lyrics shine bright, but those naïve backing vocals on the chorus sound pretty unelegant, if not annoying. 7.9/10 Graveyard marks a perfect equilibrium between the soft emotional sophistication of the previous tracks and the catchy mild flavor of Ed Sheeran's kind of pop. No particular flaws here, it does not establish as an impressive standout, but it leaves a ...

Poppy's third studio album sharply scratches your ear through psychedelic heavy metal exploits, exhuding bipolarism through radical sound shifts executed in the most teen-pop feasible key. First track is Concrete , which apparently sets the thematic atmosphere with a darkly alarm siren synth filling the intro. As the song progresses, the whole structure becomes confusing. Sure, it is purposefully motley, but, as for Madonna's God Control , the different sonic units do not feel connected by any criteria, they just come across as a patchwork with no glue. As an opening track, it lives to its task in giving an imprinting of craziness and showcasing as in a party buffet the several formulas that are going to be used in the rest of the album. It just feels chopped and therefore not really memorable. Interestingly enough, a section of this track is incredibly similar to Family of Me by Ben Folds. Last note: you can't close a track like this with a faded outro. I mean, c...

Gomez's first studio album in five years showcases subtlely varied sonic influences conveyed in a delightful soft dance-pop formula, teaching how to be powerful in the most gentle and smart way. The album starts with a vibrant african drum, paving the way to a mildly enjoyable title track, that keeps on doing its thing until the end. There are no particularly bright moments, Rare  is an homogeneous song, the chord progression never changes throughout the different structural units, the chorus is not memorable and shows a pretty lazy composition, yet it accounts as for its opening track duties.   6.3/10 Dance Again immediately feels more interesting. But it's when the electronic bass gets into a magnetic chorus that your brain is irrevocably infected in a sinusoidal groove. The second pre-chorus is the best part of the whole track, it creates a tension that is so satisfactorily solved by the second chorus. Fluid and groovy, this track has that something ext...

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...