Charli XCX - Crash

  • Charli XCX makes a compelling, sardonic comment on the music industry at the expense of making a truly great pop album.
  • Share
  • Charlotte Emma Aitchison is not your conventional pop star. Over ten-plus years, her fanbase has sprawled across two cohorts that are typically at odds: the mainstream pop community and the experimentally-minded dance music cognoscenti. She introduced herself to the world as a pop princess with a predilection for spiky, retro pop before veering hard left, working with producers like SOPHIE and making A. G. Cook her one-time creative director. Her latest album, Crash, ends a long and torrid five-album deal with Atlantic that Aitchison signed when she was only 16. Described as a "performance art piece," Crash is both her most accessible album to date and also an allegory for the ways stereotypical pop artists "sacrifice their souls" to the major label music industry. Crash comes with dramatic and macabre visuals of Aitchison portraying a cult leader, performing a blood ceremony in custom Lemáine. In another clip, she's scantily dressed in venomous black, gyrating beside a lover's grave. The record's femme fatale aesthetic brings to mind the likes of iconoclast horror film figures The Love Witch's Elaine and Addams Family's Morticia. Earlier this year Aitchison took to Twitter to explain the intentions behind this pointed imagery with fans: "A thought: Imagine if this entire album campaign was just a commentary on navigating the major label system and the sadistic nature of pop music as a whole?" This unwavering focus on concept has produced one of Aitchison's most approachable, yet most incoherent, albums in years. The singer-songwriter who doesn't need to be spoon fed half-written tracks decided to accept pitch songs anyway, work with her A&R for the first time in a decade, croon over instantly recognizable interpolations and, in other words, do the unspeakable with a wink: sell out. As she prepared to depart from a 13-year record deal in which she was lucky enough to enjoy abundant creative freedom, she was curious to play the system like everyone else for once. As she explained in a recent interview with NPR: "Throughout that time, I've never really utilized the major label in the way that I am supposed to. I've kind of always gone off grid, made my own path." Aitchison knows that good pop music is expansive and chameleonic, and the record opens with some of its most vibrant tracks. Her cyborg vocals soar over the teary-eyed celestial trance of "Constant Repeat" like a spaceship carrying her lover into orbit. On the new-school electro jam "New Shapes," Aitchison reunites with past Charli collaborators Caroline Polachek and Christine and the Queens, a trio who complement each other superbly. Christine adds restrained passion to the second verse, while the fantastical hills and valleys of Polachek's vocal range infuses color into the sparse production of the bridge. Lead single "Good Ones" boasts the most exhilarating chorus of the album, with Aitchison's voice undulating smoothly above '80s synths. If her last album, the lockdown-inspired how i'm feeling now, showed us the real, vulnerable, Charli, on Crash we encounter her sexy and unbothered alter ego. At turns she tells a partner she "can't change" her noncommittal ways, cheats on her partner and admits she's game to break hearts. But there are also emotional plot twists, like in "Yuck," where she laments developing feelings for someone who was only meant to be a fling. Things get hairy when Aitchinson starts trying to create the ultimate mainstream pop album. Much of Crash was inspired by listening to American funk band Cameo and Janet Jackson's 1986 LP Control, and the influence is obvious in tracks like "Baby," "Lightning" and "Yuck." These songs speak to the disco and electro-pop resurgence that has infiltrated mainstream music during the pandemic—think Doja Cat's enduring 2019 hit "Say So" or Dua Lipa's glossy Future Nostalgia album, which followed it a year later. While these songs are solid enough on their own, as part of Crash they sound like awkward insertions. They're undercut by an album that otherwise ambitiously attempts to straddle PC Music-inspired tracks ("Twice," "Constant Repeat"), sentimental ballads ("Every Rule," "Move Me") and bold interpolations of classic dance music tunes. In January, Aitchison told EW, "I felt like Crash wouldn't really be a truthful representation of what it's like to be a female pop artist signed to Atlantic Records without doing an interpolation song." The first of these, "Beg For You," borrows from September's dance pop hit "Cry For You" and makes a shockingly good impression thanks to avant-pop star Rina Sawayama's diva-worthy vocals and a skippy garage beat. The downside to cribbing from records as iconic as these is that an artist is forced to land with enough panache to make listeners forget about the original for a few minutes. This is where "Used To Know Me"—sampling Robin S.'s legendary house track "Show Me Love"—falls flat, with lyrics and melodies that can't hold their own next to the iconic organ bassline. The tracks that perform the best sound like extensions of how Aitchison merged UK dance music, hyperpop and radio-friendly fare on how i'm feeling now. Crash's deluxe version contains many of these—"Selfish Girl" throws in head-banging UK garage, while over the twinkling synths of "What You Think About Me," Aitchison finally makes use of the full range of her vocal sounds, switching from nasally shouts to buttery coos in a matter of seconds. Released only a week after the original, it already raises the question: "What if?" Miraculously, after all these years in the cutthroat music industry, Aitchison is just as revered for her hyped-up, braggadocious vocals on her SOPHIE-produced "Vroom Vroom" single as she is for conventional pop anthems like her first international hit, 2014's "Boom Clap." In an ideal world, balancing these conflicting sounds would only give an artist of her mettle a competitive edge over her peers, but when navigating a wider music industry that continues to thrive on neatly-paved genres and simple artist compartmentalization, pressure to conform to multiple sonic worlds at once doesn't come without its disadvantages. Though not without its charms, the floundering moments of Crash suggests that Charli XCX may be most comfortable making subversive music.
  • Tracklist
      01. Crash 02. New Shapes feat. Christine and Queens & Caroline Polachek 03. Good Ones 04. Constant Repeat 05. Beg For You feat. Rina Sawayama 06. Move Me 07. Baby 08. Lightning 09. Every Rule 10. Yuck 11. Used To Know Me 12. Twice
RA