Kesha’s Gag Order is an anti-pop revelation

On Gag Order, Kesha bucks over two decades of empowerment pop.

Kesha, Gag Order
★★★★

“Keep on survivin’, I’m a survivor,” sang Destiny’s Child at the turn of the millennium. “Don’t f—in’ call me a fighter… You have no f—in’ idea,” sings Kesha on her remarkable new album, Gag Order. As a cultural barometer, you could call it how it started vs how it’s going: bullishly optimistic to fatalistically bleak, in just 20-odd years of pop. Yep, sounds about right.

Once the bacchanalian party girl of mega-hits such as Tik Tok and Die Young, the shadow of her unsuccessful court battle against her former producer Lukasz “Dr Luke” Gottwald has lingered heavily over Kesha’s recent work. In October 2014 the singer sued the producer, alleging years of sexual, physical and emotional abuse. In April 2016 her lawsuit in New York was dismissed, while in August the same year the singer dropped another lawsuit in California. The case continues, with Dr Luke’s countersuit for defamation set to go to trial in July.

It seems a desolate environment in which to be creative. And yet 2017’s Rainbows, Kesha’s first album after the unsuccessful case, was a f— ’em all retort, opening with the defiant catch-cry “Don’t let the bastards get you down”, a pair of roaring Eagles of Death Metal cameos, and became best known for its emotional anthem Praying, a scorched earth rebuke against unnamed monsters that she performed so powerfully at the 2018 Grammys. 2020’s High Road was a brat-rap throwback, driven by party anthems and love songs touching on New Orleans bounce, EDM, ’80s funk, chiptunes and even, um, polka. Few could blame the singer’s desire for a playful distraction from the traumatic headlines, but its escapist bent felt evasive and distancing.

Which makes Gag Order - again, released on Dr Luke’s Kemosabe Records; at 36, Kesha’s still locked into a contract she signed at 18 - a fascinating turn into the dark, marinating in the complex confusion of her continuing ordeal. Produced by Rick Rubin, a barefooted studio guru with a track record for inducing artists to “go there” (the album includes numerous spoken word interpolations from new-agey figures including Ram Dass), the results are sparse yet soul-churning.

Opener Something to Believe In opens with muted Eno-esque tones and rumbling bass, setting the foreboding mood. “I sit and watch the pieces fall, I don’t know who I am at all”, Kesha sings on the song, co-written with her mum Pebe Sebert. The Drama, co-written with Kurt Vile and featuring skittering Moroder electro turning into industrial grind, is a Wonka journey of a song, culminating in a chugging nod to The Ramones’ I Wanna Be Sedated as Kesha chants about wanting to be reincarnated as a house cat.

For all its heavy tonal cohesion, the album finds space for such absurdity. On the highlight Fine Line, Kesha flitters between anger and despair amid grinding Kanye-esque synths and hymnal vocals, before managing a bleak jab at the process of transforming trauma to art (for the financial benefit of her alleged abuser, at that): “There’s a fine line between what’s entertaining and what’s just exploiting the pain. But hey, look at all the money we made off me,” she deadpans. Only Love Can Save Us Now, which might ebb closest to Kesha’s early rebel-rap era, finds the singer playing as gospel diva, even hilariously yelling “Get the holy water!”

In pre-release press notes, Kesha called the album “post-pop”, a knowing rebuke of pop’s celebratory vigour and at least two decades of chart-reigning empowerment pop, that hit-making sub-niche encompassing Britney’s Stronger, Katy Perry’s Firework, Rachel Platten’s Fight Song and the rest that platform spiritual uplift as salvation. “Without the darkness there is no light. So I let my darkness have the light,” Kesha added in a “manifesto” written ahead of the release. Not just a startling reevaluation of her own musical essence, it feels like a sign of the times.

- Robert Moran

Millennial anthems: Alex Lahey’s third album is also her first since turning 30.

Alex Lahey, The Answer is Always Yes
★★★½

Alex Lahey is one of Australian music’s most likable characters. Her upbeat songs - fusing pop, rock, punk and garage elements - are intimate snapshots of life, peppered with humour and a candid honesty that feels like having a heart-to-heart with a mate over a couple of pints.

On her first two albums, 2017’s Love You Like a Brother and 2019’s The Best of Luck Club, Lahey focused on relationships and the turbulence of being in one’s twenties. Emotions normally left unsaid were presented upfront in the song titles, whether lamenting the changing social tides (I Don’t Get Invited to Parties Anymore) or slipping into bad habits (I Haven’t Been Taking Care of Myself). One of The Best of Luck Club’s catchiest songs, Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself, was an extended hand to a friend – but also, perhaps, to the musician herself.

In comparison, Lahey’s third album – and first in her thirties – is a little more abstract, but retains her trademark heart and sincerity. She’s still reflecting on these inter- and intrapersonal topics, but with the added wisdom of hindsight and growing up.

Take lead single Congratulations as an example – a plodding number about the strangeness of hearing about two exes getting married in rapid succession. “If I don’t care, then why do I still think about you all the time?” Lahey ponders. The song plays out like a long sigh; there’s the obvious resignation and sadness in her thoughts and delivery, but also a kind of maturity: love goes on, anyway.

Alex Lahey, your charismatic and affable narrator.Credit: Pooneh Ghana

The pulsing The Sky is Melting might be one of Lahey’s best yet, unfolding like a mini movie. It’s the singer’s version of the classic drug trip song, spiked with specific details that bring the listener directly into the scene (“tried to sell me mushrooms from the back of his Skyline,” she sings; later in the song, the characters lose themselves in Epstein conspiracy theories while listening to Michael Bolton on repeat).

The song is at once melancholic and life-affirming – time spent wasting away, but at least it’s with the ones you love. Along with the contemplative Permanent, it’s comparable to work by heart-on-sleeve contemporaries such as Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers, with a unique Lahey twist.

Switching genres, the pummelling punk number They Wouldn’t Let Me In, on which Lahey adopts a rapid speak-singing style, sees the musician diving into her memories of being a queer teenager for the first time. There’s a helplessness to it as Lahey sketches the contours of feeling like an outsider at this pivotal point of life, but a comfort, too, in knowing that Lahey’s singing directly to her community – that these words will reach those who need to hear them.

For all the contemplative moments, Lahey still knows how to deliver striking and memorable hooks. Big choruses abound on this record, as on the rollicking opener Good Time, breakup stomper You’ll Never Get Your Money Back (which plays out a little like the answer to Ben Folds’ 1996 classic track Song for the Dumped) and the glimmering Shit Talkin’. The latter exemplifies Lahey’s signature spin on larrikinism, good-natured yet with a sharp observational wit.

Lahey’s music, mostly straightforward, has never been about reinventing the wheel, but there are enough new elements here to signify evolution, while also continuing with the personality-driven nature of her work. The Answer is Always Yes is a well-rounded collection of songs that scans the enormity of life’s experiences, led by a charismatic and affable narrator. Like its title suggests, in the face of struggle and change, there’s a kind of optimism that can see us through.

- Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

Thrilling, grooving, imaginative: Steve Barry’s latest recording for Earshift.

Steve Barry, In the Waves
★★★★

From the first time I heard Steve Barry, it was clear he was not just a good player but a musical force field. That was around 2009, and this album is the finest instalment to date of the pianist’s bristling musical intelligence, rhythmic mutability, melodic flair and compositional gifts. It helps like hell that among his collaborators is one of the truly great drummers: New Yorker Eric Harland.

Barry is part of the mass migration of New Zealand jazz pianists to Sydney that includes July Bailey, Mike Nock, Dave MacRae, Chris Abrahams and so many more. (One wonders if many pianos in Aotearoa are now just gathering dust.) All have enriched creative music in Australia beyond measure.

Among Barry’s particular contributions lies the challenges he crafts for his players, taking them out of snug comfort zones and obliging them to expand their vocabularies to solve intriguing musical problems. As well as Harland, Barry has the New York-based alto saxophonist Will Vinson and Sydney bassist Thomas Botting, who stride across the complexities like giants across rugged terrain, and reduce it all back to its essences of being thrilling, grooving, redolent and imaginative music.

Lithospheric, referring to the outer crust of the Earth’s geology, has Vinson’s prickly alto skating over mobile bass lines, punctuated by stabilising piano chords. Harland emphasises the bass’s flux, goads both Vinson and Barry into visceral explorations of the composed possibilities, and then takes the foreground himself, with the intersection between his figures and textures pointing to why he’s so revered. Nothing sounds like it comes from a stockpile of licks, but from a mind buzzing with ingenuity.

Sydney pianist Steve Barry (pictured) shares the album with one of the world’s greatest drummers in Eric Harland.Credit: David Collins

The phrasing of First 11 shudders and jolts, then subsides to a solo from Botting, the warm, woolly sound of which provides temporary respite, before Vinson plunges us into a series of jutting shapes linked by swoops and cries, and Botting and Harland have fun chopping up the tune’s bridge behind Barry’s undulations.

On Dirt and Alchemy was inspired by the idea that the more you feel mired by all the world throws at you, the more you stand to gain in extracting yourself. The music fizzes with optimism, as Vinson becomes fully airborne over a ferocious swing, and Barry enjoys rousing interplay with Harland’s gold rush of ideas, leading to another striking drum feature.

Barry then lets us catch our breath via the gentle strains of Half Moon Lights, although the enchantment could have been further increased had it been performed without the saxophone, because Vinson’s stridency partially undermines impressionistic beauty. Thixotropy (the tendency for some substances to turn to water under extreme pressure) is almost funky – in a 15/4 sort of way. The melody reminds me of something Frank Zappa might have penned, being playful, charming and convoluted all at once, and Vinson’s chirpy solo is a masterful response.

Tug Lightly on the Invisible Thread references the notion that creative ideas already exist in the universe, and our job is to coax them into actuality. It’s an engrossing composition, with Vinson, now on soprano, endlessly inventive, and the rhythm section carving a deep groove. The title track is an evocation of swimming in the surf, complete with melodic somersaults and massive forward momentum from Harland and Botting. The album closes with another breath-catcher, the hypnotic Float, which shows the resourcefulness of all involved is just as gripping at a relative whisper.

As with seemingly everything appearing on the Earshift label these days, the recording quality is rich and sonorous, catching every nuance of Harland’s electrifying drumming.

- John Shand

Jessie Ware, That! Feels Good!
★★★★

Perhaps one of the more remarkable things about Jessie Ware’s euphoric fifth album That! Feels Good! is just how close we came to not hearing it. The British singer – who broke out in the early 2010s with the best-selling album Devotion and as a guest vocalist on singles by SBTRKT and Disclosure – was poised to give up music after the lacklustre reception to her 2017 album Glasshouse. In interviews, Ware would recount the story of “an absolute Jesus Christ of a shocker” performance at Coachella, after which her mother simply told her to quit.

Feelgood pop: Jessie Ware’s follow-up to her 2020 instant classic is another euphoric crowd-pleaser.

Ware didn’t exactly quit, but she did step back from music for a period to focus on her podcast Table Manners, in which she and her mum Lennie invite celebrities around for dinner and a chat. The pair’s cheeky banter and warmth (along with copious amounts of wine) was a winning combination, and the podcast became hugely successful, hosting everyone from Ed Sheeran to London Mayor Sadiq Khan to Sam Smith to Stanley Tucci.

With the pressure off, and a new record label in tow, Ware went into the studio with renowned producer James Ford with one goal in mind: to just have fun. The result was game-changing. Ware’s 2020 album What’s Your Pleasure? was the finest of her career, a glittering exploration of disco and the sounds of the London clubs Ware grew up in. Worlds away from the rigidity of Glasshouse, What’s Your Pleasure? was freeing, sexy, and oh so bloody fun.

With a swell of critical acclaim and legions of new fans at her back, Ware has kept the party rolling with That! Feels Good!. An expansion of the sonic universe of What’s Your Pleasure?, That! Feels Good! – produced largely with the renowned Clarence Coffee Jr. and Stuart Price – sees Ware even more closely channelling idols like Donna Summer, Diana Ross, R&B and soul legend Teena Marie, and Chaka Khan. If her fourth album was a journey into the dark and seductive depths of the club, her fifth evokes shards of golden light rippling across the dancefloor.

We know what we’re in for from the start: we’re ushered into the record with a swirl of whispering voices, before the title tracks blooms with a springy bassline that could have been transported straight from Stevie Wonder’s Superstition. It sets up a gilded run: Free Yourself (the record’s unofficial and unyielding motto) is rapturous, driving us all up the mountain-top, while Pearls has Ware cut through the shimmering curtain of keys to declare “I’m a lover, a freak and a mother”. Released as the second single from the record, Pearls is a standout on That! Feels Good!, as Ware sends her commanding vocals spinning to the top reaches of her range. When she scrapes the ceiling to sing “let’s just dance”, there’s no option to refuse her.

Where What’s Your Pleasure? entwined elements of ’90s London dance, That! Feels Good! opts for a much more classic palette of disco, R&B, and soul: horns blare and puncture, pianos tinkle and stab, guitars bounce, backing singers create walls of gleaming harmonies. At its centre Ware stands, a bold and jubilant presence reeling the wallflowers onto the dancefloor. Hello Love is warm and intimate, while closer These Lips is another high point, driven by propulsive percussion and plumes of horns – and the cascading melody of the pre-chorus will bring a smile to the most unmoving of faces.

If That! Feels Good! lacks anything, it’s a moment of downtime to break up the partying. But this is a minor quibble, because when it’s this fun who wants the party to stop anyway?

- Jules LeFevre

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