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In the modern pop world, awash as it is with a plethora of self-styled quirky, genre (and in rare cases, gender) traversing artists, we reviewers on occasion find ourselves faced with a problem: When a record which is genuinely interesting, prolifically creative, and, above all else – better than all of the generic crap that seems to get lauded daily - comes along... how do you do it justice?
‘New Worlds’, Charlotte Hatherley’s third, is one such album. It defies convention – it’s simultaneously a pop record and an experiment in sound – immediately approachable and, like her first two albums, infinitely sustainable to repeat listens. It’s the type of album that makes a jaded reviewer desperate to follow suit and avoid the standard journalistic clichés. It just deserves better.
So, mentioning the catchy off-kilter guitar and gorgeous chorus that is resplendent on first single, ‘White’, or the jagged riffery that adds a slightly unhinged feel to affairs in the schizophrenic ‘Full Circle’, or the driving rhythms and sparse guitar style in ‘Little Sahara’, or that ‘Firebird’ is a delightfully hopeful change of pace with a sumptuous vocal melody and performance... Well, it almost wouldn’t be fair.
While such praise is much-deserved, those terms feel like they lose meaning when they are simultaneously being applied to any half-arsed artist that bothers to invest in a MicroKorg and an 80s compilation. This is the type of record that only people like Charlotte Hatherley are making.
It’s full of musical ideas with a mind of their own, arriving whenever they feel like it, taking a bow and vanishing in a puff of smoke. The listener doesn’t get a chance to get used to a theme within a song before it changes. Each play through provides a new kind of delight to the ears as a result. Even when they share a song, no two verses sound the same.
‘Alexander’ in a sense encapsulates the essence of the album, and is one of many highlights. It starts off with a repeating acoustic motif and somewhat fragile vocals, building throughout, introducing new feels, new sounds, and an impassioned chorus; a journey of a song, befitting an album which takes in many sights and sounds.
‘New Worlds’ is a record which actually is genre-traversing in much more than the sense casually thrown around in the re-written press releases that pass for reviews nowadays. It features more instruments and sounds than can be counted, although the emphasis is thankfully placed on the guitar, which incredibly, though unsurprisingly, Ms Hatherley is able to make sound just as fresh as the rest of the album.
Herein lays the quirky element – not the self-styled, cynical type of quirkiness that gets decided upon in marketing meetings. It’s honesty, a willingness to just experiment, a childlike inventiveness and moodiness, a total disregard for everything else around at the moment. ‘New Worlds’ sounds like little else, yet it is the type of record more people should be making: One which only they could make.
Though it teeters along the line between randomness and conventional musical ideas, everything fits together perfectly by design. Charlotte Hatherley is the architect who deserves all the praise she gets. While ‘Grey Will Fade’ and ‘The Deep Blue’ were both successes in their own right, it is ‘New Worlds’ which confirms Hatherley’s arrival as a solo artist.
