196. Robyn, "Body Talk"

 


I was gonna indignantly say "Why didn't anyone tell me about this album???" but all kinds of people have been talking about this album for years and I just wasn't listening.  I think I had this idea that Robyn was some kind of EDM thing but this is (for the most part) a blast of straight pop goodness from Sweden, where they definitely know how to write pop bangers.  This album fucking goes so hard, I love it.

Robyn had a couple of hits as a teen-pop sensation so she wasn't an unknown quality when she started recording this album, which was released in 2010.  Of course Max Martin was involved; he's basically the Rosetta Stone of modern pop music.  My prior contact with it was when Pitchfork listed it as one of the top 10 albums of the 2010s, but I think I only got a few tracks into it before I moved on.  Pity, because there is a bunch of great shit on here.

Let's take "Time Machine," the fifth track.  Like the other songs, I guess you'd call it electro-pop.  Solid drum (machine) pattern, definitely dance-friendly at 128 bpm, but it really opens up with the chorus, a soaring, shiny chorus that is so characteristic of Swedish pop.  "Call Your Girlfriend" is another great one in the same mold, which features Robyn telling the listener to break up with his (or her, I suppose) girlfriend, and giving advice on same:

You just tell her that the only way her heart will mend
Is when she learns to love again
And it won't make sense right now but you're still her friend
And then you let her down easy

Call your girlfriend
It's time you had the talk
Give your reasons
Say it's not her fault
But you just met somebody new
And now it's gonna be me and you

OK!  I'll do it!

There are a few curveballs in this collection of pop confections.  "U Should Know Better" has Snoop guesting on a tale of jet-setting around Europe and, what the hell, intervening in Richard Nixon's administration:

Yo, I was there at Watergate
You know I rigged my gear got the fuckers on tape
They put the mic in the hand of the wrong MC
Even the C-I-A knows not to fuck with me

"Don't Fucking Tell Me What To Do" is another out of pocket song, with mechnically repeated phrases like "My drinking is killing me/My smoking is killing me/My diet is killing me/My heels are killing me/My shopping's killing me" before breaking out in the titular chorus.

Anyway, don't take my word for it.  This album is just great, highly recommend.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Oh yeah.

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