{allcanada} Album of the Week: Carly Rae Jepsen

 

Amazon.com - Amazon.ca - Barnes & Noble - Classmates - GameStop - Match.com - Work From Home

In a year with no anointed "song of the summer," Carly Rae Jepsen was releasing one a week.

She did it quietly, debuting new songs on YouTube with little fanfare, buried on Friday afternoons in July. It's quite a difference from our first introduction to Jepsen, when Call Me Maybe exploded like a bubblegum firecracker all over 2012's summertime months.

Jepsen then spent the next three years doing everything except recording "Call Me Maybe, Part 2;" playing Cinderella on Broadway, scrapping a folk album and whittling down over 200 potential songs for her long-awaited third album.

The result is E•MO•TION (**** out of four), an '80s synthpop fantasy-land that, instead of trying to replicate Maybe's meteoric success, feels revolutionary in its alternative: skipping the idea of singles entirely to make an encyclopedia full of perfectly-executed pop archetypes.

Jepsen's no stranger to packaging her music into bite-sized singles and videos, but E•MO•TION is best suited for a different kind of consumption: the binge-listen.

Running through E•MO•TION front-to-back is exhilarating and exhausting, capable of revealing a new favorite track with each new replay: the saxophones that jump-start album opener Run Away With Me; the quiet radiance of Favorite Color; the manic girl-power anthem Boy Problems; the club-ready Disclosure dupe I Didn't Just Come Here To Dance; and the retro, Dev Hynes-engineered All That, which deserves to soundtrack every prom slow dance in America.

To tap into the record's sticky-sweet nostalgia, Jepsen recruited producers such as pop maximalist Sia and Ariel Rechtshaid, famous for helping pop's elite tap into their '80s fetish. As a result, E•MO•TION is kindred spirits with Haim's Days Are Gone, another Rechtshaid-assisted album—only raised on Cyndi Lauper instead of Fleetwood Mac.

But crediting Jepsen's success to the collaborators in her orbit, from her producers to her star-making manager Scooter Braun, strips the agency away from one of pop's most underrated stars. Jepsen writes her own lyrics, and while E•MO•TION's verses often get tripped up in cliche, they're strongest when Jepsen is asserting her own power.

"I'm not a flower on the wall / I am growing 10 feet, 10 feet tall," she sings on the title track, planting a flag in a crowded pop landscape that all but wrote her off. Jepsen won't be so easily dismissed—and offers up one of 2015's very best albums as proof.

Download: E•MO•TION, All That, Making The Most Of The Night

Entertainment Plaza - TV, Movies, Sports, Music, Soaps
http://members.shaw.ca/almosthuman99

Babe Of The Month - Vote Now!
http://members.shaw.ca/almosthuman99/babeofthemonth.html

Hunk Of The Month - Vote Now!
http://members.shaw.ca/almosthuman99/babeofthemonthman.html