Charli XCX - BRAT Review
‘BRAT’ is frighteningly addictive and self-assured as Charli struts expertly through surprisingly intimate lyricism and irresistible dance numbers to deliver a nuanced picture of modern womanhood.
A truly great album can resist the stasis of its form by forcing itself outside of the first listening experience and into the future. After one listen, the album might have a song that can be instantly recalled, a lyric that may already be jotted down in a notebook before retrospection and later reflection sweats misty necessity over the listener. For Charli xcx’s sixth studio album ‘BRAT’, every song transforms and transcends the average listening experience to become instantly recallable, unique and identifiable. The album is frighteningly addictive and self-assured as Charli struts expertly through surprisingly intimate lyricism and irresistible dance numbers to deliver a nuanced picture of modern womanhood.
Pulling in 5 stars from several trustworthy sources (DIY, The Telegraph, Dork, The Skinny and so on), ‘BRAT’ has critics and fans in a frenzy; from the dawn of the album where colour analyst experts explained the off-kilter fluorescent green of the cover, the hype has almost overtaken the music. Yet, from the first note of ‘360’, the album dispels any notion that this is a performative or lazy record hiding behind the digital hysteria Charli’s it-girl image easily encourages.
The beginning might give the average listener whip-lash, as Charli wastes no time with niceties and throws us straight into fierce track ‘Club classics’. As the grandiose ‘Sympathy is a knife’ plays, Charli references her fiancé George for a second time. In the extremely personal lyrics (‘Why I wanna buy a gun? / Why I wanna shoot myself? / Volatile at war with my dialogue’), Charli indicates that her character, identity and her personal life are tied into this – this isn’t a joke, a guise or a project for Charli. This is her life.
This then slides effortlessly into early fan favourite ‘Talk Talk’, which continues tackling the theme of language and verbosity - language as an uncontrollable form of confession, language as exposing, language as a forever-stain in the digital age. This imbues her brat-persona, self-aggrandising tracks like ‘Von Dutch’ with a meatier weight, which starts with the infamous line ‘It’s okay to just admit that you’re jealous of me’. A G Cook, long-time Charli collaborator and king of ‘PC Music’, has since remixed ‘Von Dutch’ with Addison Rae singing new sickly-aggro lines about the backlash to her debut, before screaming over the dance beat. It was an instant hit. Here, Charli fosters a reactionary space in which a meta, almost camp exploration of what the scene does to music, identity and parasocial relationships can flourish – both the good and the bad. Consequently, ‘BRAT’ speaks to, with, at and for any listener implicit in mainstream music and meaning-making, an achievement very few records have been able to do with equal severity and grace.
Charli isn’t afraid to test the waters of new sonic landscapes. Listen to ‘Everything is romantic’ to hear a titillating harp and ethereal strings nose-dive swiftly into heavy synth and a trap-like drum-track. It’s a masterclass in maximalist, expansive electro-dance music. The piano in ‘Mean girls’ is a particular triumph with the savvy fingerprints of A G Cook all over it.
‘Girl, so confusing’ offers another take on girlhood. Charli recently admitted she was, of course, jealous of the hype Lorde received for 2013 song ‘Royals’, a pop-alternative artist operating at the same time and in the same spaces as Charli. The song provides good old-fashioned speculation, existing simultaneously as a rumination on how gendered comparison and jealousy can hinder growth and potential (and how complicit celebrity culture might be here) and an accessible single for younger fans, with the catchy and completely necessary chorus insisting ‘it’s so confusing sometimes to be a girl’.
The penultimate track is a curve ball. On ‘I think about it all the time’, Charli’s southern accent shines through the lighter use of autotune. What follows is a heart-breaking and truthful take on how motherhood fits into the life of a pop-star - will she run out of time before she can truly make something valued highest by a society that still views women for their reproductive uses? ‘We had a conversation on the way home – should I stop my birth control? Because my career feels so small in the existential scheme of it all’ a warped, slightly sped up voice recounts, as if to rush through the haltingly large questions people with working ovaries must ask themselves. We’ve never heard Charli so vulnerable and honest. Charli had received backlash for the initial album posters stamped with what one might instantly identify as a drug baggy on the front. (Rest assured, she later photoshopped a sandwich into the poster and called it a day.) Such a intense and exposing personal moment fitting so well onto an otherwise drug-club record shows what an impressive album ‘BRAT’ actually is.
Charli lets us investigate this swirling abyss for a moment or two, before rounding off the album with an expertly produced amalgamation of the entire album, accompanying us through all the emotions of a normal night out –swagger, excitement, euphoria, instability, uncertainty, dread, joy, movement, elation, fear, dance, dance, dance. This record tracks, under the guise of a night out, the movement of life as it’s drawn in and out of lungs, pumping around the body, and expelled in the way we dance and sing. When the final silence settles in, we are left with the evidence of how identity shape-shifts and meanings are stripped to their truest forms when we are truly, and unexpectedly, moved.