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2020 has brought us many gifts; most of them about as welcome as a rattlesnake in a lucky dip.
It’s not all been bad: an encouraging and necessary consequence of being locked down from each other has been the advancement of causes long ignored by people who just wanted an easier life, and one of those has been women making music whilst unafraid to step away from the male gaze.
Rationally speaking though, it was never expected that Brightest Blue – Ellie Goulding’s fourth album and her first in five years – would sound much like Fiona Apple’s wildly idiosyncratic Fetch The Bolt Cutters, nor should it have done. Goulding’s career had given the impression of being so carefully moulded to the point that 2015’s inescapable hit Love Me Like You Do made her as famous as she appeared malleable, whilst inevitably tutting judgers frowned on her string of high profile boyfriends and rumours of alcohol issues circulated in the background.
The singer married in 2019 and Brightest Blue is a sprawling, two-part attempt to turn the page, but it isn’t a peek into someone’s loved up diary like Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour. Split into Vulnerable (on her own) and a shorter Confident (largely collaborations) part called EG.0, the latter contains a trio of producer-led mega hits released already at various points over the last eighteen months.
Especially poignant is the ex-baiting Hate Me, on which rapper Juice WRLD provides the male counter, while Close To Me remains a messy sex jam you wouldn’t want your new mother-in-law to hear. If being objectified for the sake of it feels gratuitous for such a high profile woman with little commercially to prove, the main act sees Goulding head towards more familiar territory. In here, it’s easy to realise that there’s no secret to her popularity; on Woman, Flux and the gospel choir assisted Power her smoky, torch-singer-next-door voice is proof she could style her way through a shopping list and make it sound like it was being warbled by angels.
The problem is that those pipes are often left to carry material with little snap. The scornful How Deep Is Too Deep holds up a mirror to commitment-phobes (‘You want to wash me/But you want me as your tattoo’), and Love I’m Given has a hint of Adele in its soulful melodrama, but too much of the rest is predictable and neat. Under this presets-and-formula straitjacket comes the saccharine New Heights, Tides’ unremarkable EDM and the ponderous opener Start, all tunes which any non-fan could comfortably be without.
2020 then; it’s been the year that’s kept on giving even when the majority of us just wish it would stop. Brightest Blue was never going to be many things, but such is the frightening velocity of art and culture, it feels out of time even at the moment it’s released.