Lily Allen – West End Girl: The end of a love as a pop reservoir :: OndaRock's Reviews

Lily Allen hadn't released an album in more than seven years, her career since popstars she seemed to have suffered a definitive setback in favor of her much desired role as a mother and her apparently satisfying relationship with the American actor David Harbour, for which she had even left her beloved London. “I earn more selling photos of my feet on Onlyfans than making music,” he declared irreverently a year ago, making his return even more unexpected. And instead, almost surprisingly, here she is back on the scene in no less prurient clothes and with a work that is transgressive in its own way.

“West End Girl” is indeed a real one concept album about the end of his relationship with Harbour, apparently anything but idyllic. In fact, each song in the setlist acts as a page in an intimate diary in which Allen, as always outspoken, reveals her pains, her confessions and the scandalous details regarding: betrayals, open relationship agreements not respected, discoveries of sex toysdiscussions about a possible vasectomy, conversations with his lovers looking more for useless reassurance than revenge, return to England. Defined without mincing words as a sex addictthe ex-partner even preferred to cancel himself from social in order to avoid, unnecessarily, too much media noise.

Be careful, however, not to throw this album, despite its truly inelegant premises, into the same cauldron of revenge song of Shakira and Miley Cyrus from a couple of years ago, in which the end of their relationships was used as a pretext to create trite, rather banal slogans to be blurted out online to the sound of memes. We're not even in the neighborhood of Taylor Swift who seemed to collect stories more with the aim of later writing contemptuous pieces about us than to enjoy them. Among the tracks of “West End Girl” Allen appears, in fact, as a disoriented woman, destroyed by doubts, in search of dialogue, who takes her blame, who has indulged her man in order not to lose him, at times open to forgiveness; not exactly a feminist heroine, in short. All the details above therefore take on more the contours of a stream of consciousness, of a very private and even interesting self-analysis, than of mere disgrace.

And in all this “gossip” context, where does the music end up? Fortunately, it occupies a very high level level, because Allen seems to have miraculously rediscovered the class and maturity of her best work, that “It's Not Me, It's You” which is not by chance literally quoted in the last and all in all reconciling “Fruityloop”. Of course, his masterpiece sounded more rigorous thanks to minimal and liquid electronics, reminiscent of the Orbit/Madonna pairing, which served as common thread among the various melodic intuitions and which this time is almost absent (with the exception of the sinuous “Pussy Palace”).
However, the delicacy with which Lily Allen tackles much of the new and varied repertoire is more than sufficient to make the soft drum'n'bass of “Ruminating” and “Relapse” coexist with the acoustic tenderness of “Just Enough” and “Let You W/In”, the pop playfulness of “4chan Stan” and “Tennis” with a “Madeline” reminiscent of Urge Overkill and with the only piece that takes up the sounds dancehall from the previous album, the still pleasant “Nonmonogamummy”.