Music, Fashion, Film is an album lacking in both good music and good ideas. I do not believe that it achieves a single one of its goals. It’s not an interesting enough experiment, it’s not an honest enough confessional and it’s not good enough as a rock album, a pop album or as a mixture of the two.
She does not have the voice for the rock styles that she chooses. It is particularly bad in the obnoxious and boring opener “Rock Music” that would be appropriative were it not so slight. It gets no better with the following “SS26” that adds a shallow cynicism and a hollow mock-profundity to the already uninteresting music.
The rock in Music, Film, Fashion is superficial. Hyperpop has already taken a great deal from rock. 100 gecs and Rina Sawayama have both mined ’00s rock to make fascinating music but they were able to do that because they clearly grew up with those sounds. Charli was clearly listening to Britney and N*SYNC instead and so she has an incredible ear for modern pop but this album shows no such understanding of rock.
She pulls two great sounds from her rock foray though. The first half of “Card Declined” and the chorus of “I’m Afraid” are both excellent. She gets harsher and harder with her rock and that works much better than the rest of the album. It makes me wish that rather than the anodyne rock she takes from for the acceptable but forgettable “Persona” and “Yeah” she had found Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill. I would have loved a Charli riot grrrl album.
She has some other decent music in “wink wink” and “2007”. They are both good Charli pop but nothing novel. “Camera” is more interesting and has both a strong opening and chorus. It also has some of her better lyrics on a very weak album lyrically. I’ve been listening to Charli for a long time. I saw her when she opened for Marina and the Diamonds. I saw her when it was me and a dozen other people at a free concert in the Golden Gate Park. I don’t claim to know her as a result but I can say that she’s much more convincing when she talks about ambition or hedonism than she ever gets in the introspection of this album.
This is fittingly at its worst at the end of the album. “No One Lasts Forever” is boring music and boring thinking and then made much worse by a trite David Cronenberg outro. It, like the rest of the album, is nearly devoid of originality.
Top Five Records 