DUA LIPA: 'FUTURE NOSTALGIA' ALBUM REVIEW
When first listening to Future Nostalgia, one might say that Dua Lipa has really done just that. Except she hasn’t. Not quite. It was so nearly there, but not quite.
For the most part, we are buoyed by the glamour of nu-disco floor-fillers, and uplifted by the hopefulness of multiple ultra-pop love songs. However, the unfeigned confidence of Lipa as she enters a new era cannot always compensate for the lyrical shortcomings and near misses in places. This slightly dampens the glow of an otherwise stunning pop album.
Nu-disco influences of the early noughties live on, and Lipa and her team of super-producers do well to take us back, most obviously to Madonna’s magic ‘Confessions on a Dancefloor’ era. We’re also reminded of Kylie Minogue, Freemasons, Shapeshifters and other glittering dance heroes who have previously employed the ready made party appeal of an 80s disco crossover.
This is really where Dua shines, her powerful vocals and “female alpha” attitude marry well with the persistent cowbell, thick bassline and Chic strings that take it to the next level. We are familiar with this new direction, due to instant-hit singles ‘Don’t Start Now’ and ‘Physical’ and momentum is maintained with more understated club tracks like ‘Levitating’, and ‘Hallucinate’ - both cosmic offerings that do what they say on the tin.
Between strobe-lit aerobic anthems, we get the chance to catch our breath with three stand out summer-night grooves. The first is ‘Cool’, co-written and backed by swedish pop-goddess Tove Lo and “I think we’re ready for the summer” is the mood. Then we have ‘Love Again’, one of the more sincere tracks where we go through the motions of opening back up to love and featuring an inspired trumpet solo from White Town’s ‘Your Woman’. Thirdly, ‘Break My Heart’ dips back into the nineties with samples from INXS, and we are served with a giddy expression of that maddening first glimmer of infatuation. Dua herself sums this track up well - “Dance Crying” she calls it, so ‘dance crying’ it is.
Where the album falters, is where we flit through the artist’s attempts at being more in-your-face with female sexual liberation. It would be hard not to mention the ‘bad, sad, mad’ songwriting in ‘Good In Bed’, or the lacklustre efforts of sort-of-sultry ‘Pretty Please’. We are longing to be on board with the message, but end up feeling left adrift by the delivery.
Then we reach the final track, ‘Boys Will Be Boys’. Dua reverses the sexist notion that “boys will be boys”, pointing out that on the flip side “girls will be women”. The message is so important, and the song is so earnest, but the contrast is so stark against every track that precedes it that we are left feeling flat. The lights have been turned on at the end of the night, and the party's over. Maybe it’s intentional, in which case the imagery here is second to none.
(((To be repeated: Cool, Hallucinate, Love Again, Break My Heart
To be skipped: Future Nostalgia, Good In Bed)))
