Shortly after the halfway point of this delightfully strange, often enchanting, always fascinating album the music gets weird. After deploying monstrous amounts of bass, a gospel choir, big drum parts, a wide range of rhythmic textures, acoustic and electric guitars and all sorts of pulses, reverbs and sound effects, Harry Styles asks himself: why not combine all these things?
Season 2 Weight Loss it starts with an electrical noise, a hum, something starting or producing feedback. Then keyboards come into play that would look great on a Kraftwerk record. Drum-and-bass breakbeats start, only the beats fall in strange places, as if they're trying to hide from time instead of marking it. The bass starts to throb, but it's slightly out of sync, as if your computer was playing three songs at once. In the text, Styles addresses a person he could have held in his arms but instead retreats. “Do you love me now?” he asks. It's neither the first nor the last time he does this Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. The music grows, callsiope-like keyboard sounds chase a chorus of distant voices, the drums hammer as if they were trying to break down a door. Then everything stops to highlight Styles' words: “You've got to sit yourself down sometimes”. At that point, the piece starts again.
Does this sound strange? It is, indeed. And it's typical of the way this album displaces expectations. Styles toured for 22 months afterward End Line of 2019 and Harry's House of 2022. After the last of the 169 dates he did in July 2023 he said he wanted to spend some time without an audience, stay away from the spotlight, get lost in the crowd, dance and sing with strangers. The music he created with producer Kid Harpoon, already a key collaborator in End Line and Harry's Housereflects this desire. He doesn't care about definitions, he erases the boundaries between genres, between pop and rock, between synthetic and “natural” music, between what is written and what is improvised, between the authentic and the artificial. The imperative is to take freedom of all kinds: sexual, obviously, but also the joy of plundering the past without worrying about history.
Unlike previous albums, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally it is less centered on the singer. Styles' voice is sometimes overshadowed by the music, it's filtered, almost buried in the mix. Even the hooks, and there are quite a few of them, are sometimes put in the background compared to “dirty” grooves and effects, which are such from a sonic and erotic point of view. It's music he wants to be more than mean. Experience matters more than ego.
The album opens with four bombs: the note Openings; American Girlswhich is played on a low register and seems to come out of an 8-bit video game; Ready, Steady, Go!with a Chic bass line and a DJ-like sound effect that plays the same song on two turntables slightly out of phase; And Are You Listening Yet?with his vibes 10s and references to both the LCD Soundsystem and the Stargate synths used by Rihanna. And then there is Dance No Morean 80s synth party with chants of “Respect your mother!” and they do a lot of ball culture.
On the cover there is a strobe ball, but Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally it's not Styles' dance album. The Waiting Game And Carla's Song I'm pop bangers with a disco dress, Coming Up Roses a ballad about a hangover night on the town played by a 39-piece orchestra used not so much as a string section, but as a band. Styles hasn't lost his taste for classic '60s tunes. In Paint by Numbers considers the pleasures and dangers of his pop star status to the accompaniment of acoustic guitar, French horns and mellotron-like keyboard. “Oh what a gift it is to be noticed, but it's got nothing to do with me,” he sings. “It's a little tricky when they put an image in your head and you get stuck inside that.” It's a theme that seems to be coming back Popan electro piece with a rococo synth-driven melody that could be about music, orgasm, drugs, or all of these things together. Styles cites injections and a lack of rolling papers before singing that “It's just me / On my knees / Immaculate fantasy / It's meant to be pop.”
For a good part of the album Harry Styles is looking for or wants to offer enlightenment, ecstasy, love, light. In the first piece, Openingssings about letting the light in. In the last one, Carla's Songfinds the light not in another person's eyes, but in what those eyes see, makes us understand that all along he was not chasing sex and love, but the ability to feel empathy and understanding. Sandwiched between the two pieces are friends flirting with the “wrong” ones, sex without intimacy, a mantra, a desire to know what it means to feel safe, and a sense of adventure that borders on psychedelia.
“If you know, you know,” Styles sings in the latest song. These are the words of someone who is returning from a trip or perhaps leaving the most exclusive club on the planet after a three-day party. “If you don't know, you don't know.” The melody advances and recedes like the tide, the beats rise upwards and he intones the final blessing: “It's all there waiting for you.”
From Rolling Stone US.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
