Club Future Nostalgia (2020) - Dua Lipa & The Blessed Madonna

Man, do I wish I liked this. After the smash success of Future Nostalgia, Dua Lipa was prevented from touring due to COVID and so she decided to instead collaborate with DJ & producer The Blessed Madonna to create a remix album. And the talent assembled here is pretty stellar. Madonna (OG, not The Blessed) herself and Missy Elliott stop by to lend their vocal talents. Mark Ronson handles a remix and gets Gwen Stefani in on guest vocals. K-Pop group Blackpink shows up on one track. But something in the mix is just way off and I feel like you can tell it right from the cover. Of course, you’re not going to get Lipa, Madonna, Missy, Gwen and Ronson all in one place to take a cover photo; of course, you’re going to do some kind of a Photoshop job. But surely it didn’t have to look this ******* terrible, did it? How much money did they really spend assembling all the talent on the seventeen tracks on this album and this is the dog**** they put on the cover? Just wow.

That aesthetic of the jumbled collage unfortunately pervades the entire album. The songs from the original album (and a couple of others like Love is Religion & Kiss and Make Up) are buried under an avalanche of kitschy sound effects, electronic vocal effects, chaotic beats and weird, awkward samples. Nothing works. Boys Will Be Boys is a perfect example. On the original album, it was a masterstroke, a strange and unexpected swerve that closed the album on a serious, striking note. Here, it comes in the middle of the album and has, for God knows what reason, a Latin-flavored feel, a kind of Rio Carnival beat, complete with piercing whistles, honking horns and a rattling cowbell. I’m not here to say that pairing up-tempo music with sad lyrics is a bad idea in general; occasionally it works. But it just doesn’t here and it’s so strange to hear these lyrics dissecting toxic masculinity and lamenting the pervasiveness of sexual assault backed by an aggressive cowbell and the sound of a block party. It’s downright tone-deaf.  Nothing else on the album rises to this level of offensiveness, but both Boys Will Be Boys and the entire album kind of raise the same question: Why?

And ultimately I guess that’s the death knell of this album. Yes, I’m biased toward the original album; I do think it’s essentially a perfect record. But here’s the truth about this remix album. None of these remixes surpass the original versions. None of them are even remotely as good. None of them are even really interesting except in the way they occasionally just puzzled me. Bottom line: I can’t imagine ever listening to any of these versions again while the original versions exist. That pretty well says it all. 1 ½ stars.

tl;dr – jumbled, messy remix album has no clear vision and can’t even come close to equaling the original versions of these songs; forgettable at best, bad at worst. 1 ½ stars.

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Future Nostalgia (2020) - Dua Lipa

Time to remedy the fact that I’ve somehow never written a review of this album. Giving it yet another relisten here recently really underscored what I already knew which is that it’s one of the best party albums I’ve ever heard. The album has only eleven tracks and it clocks it at under thirty-eight minutes; if you know me, you know that the album has already done a ton of heavy lifting based on being this short and this carefully curated. Lipa has talked about loving the process of releasing deluxe editions of her albums and that this has led her to be really “cutthroat” (her word) about cutting songs from the original album and I think this serves her extremely well here. This album just blows by at light speed and it’s nearly impossible to do anything but just listen to it again. And, amazing as this sounds, every single track is an absolute banger. This is that fabled “all-killer, no-filler” pop album that everybody’s always chasing. I mean, she did it. This is it. We found it. This is the one. I could literally write a sentence, at least, about every track on this album and why it’s good. Suffice it to just talk specifically about three of them, my three favorites.

Two of them come right next to each other, tracks 8 & 9, Love Again & Break My Heart. We’re past the half-point of the album when we get to this killer one-two punch of pure musical brilliance and maybe it feels like the album should start coasting towards a stop pretty soon. But Love Again just comes alive with this earworm sample of the 1930s era ballad My Woman; it’s this incredibly catchy cycling string part and it leads into the predictably thumping beat and an anthemic, aren’t they all, chorus of “God damn, you got me in love again.” This is followed by Break My Heart, another incredibly catchy song that has this amazing disco-influenced chorus that just won’t stop. These two songs neatly sum up the album as a whole; they have a very similar dance-pop vibe, but they both have a unique sonic identity, driven by the sample in Love Again and the stuttering chorus of Break My Heart. That’s kind of how the first ten songs here all are; the vibe is upbeat party music and they all have a similar stylistic flourish to them while also having their own identity. You can recognize them all instantly despite the fact that they all have a similar sound, if that makes sense. That makes for the first thirty-four minutes of this album being a non-stop sugar-rush of a party.

And then it is with that eleventh song, Boys Will Be Boys, that I think Dua Lipa pushes this album right over the top from dance-pop classic to just being an all-around great album. The final song sounds very different from anything else on the album and, while not a dirge by any means, it’s a slower paced song and it deals very blatantly with toxic masculinity and the way society as a whole turns a blind eye to the bad behavior of men. When I use the word “sobering” to describe this song, I am, in a way, being very literal. If the first ten tracks feels like an exuberant, high-energy, joyous night at the club, then this song kind of feels like walking back to your car in the darkened parking lot with, as Lipa sings at one point, your keys in between your fingers. I can only imagine that the label probably pressured Lipa to leave this song off the record; it definitely ends the album on a down note and some reviewers have taken issue with it and said that it should have been left off. But to me, it’s that tonal inconsistency that makes it the brilliant and unexpected choice that it is. I don’t mean this at all to denigrate “pop artists” by saying what I’m about to say, but I think it’s a good way to succinctly get at what I think the choice of closing the album like this does. It moves Lipa from the realm of “pop artist” to “great artist,” if you know what I mean. Now, without this final track, would I still say this is a great album? Yes. Would I still say Lipa is a great artist? Yes. Because making the kind of exuberant, totally successful party music that Lipa and her collaborators do on these first ten tracks is absolutely an artform and not an easy one. But do I respect her even more as an artist because of this final, surprising, iconoclastic move? Absolutely. Because she aims to expand the emotional palette of the album with that song and, rather than it feeling clunky or forced, it actually works and somehow brings the album to a perfectly messy close. Anyway, it was long overdue for me to write up a full review of this fantastic album. And if you haven’t heard it yet, well, that’s long overdue too. 4 stars.

tl;dr – a banger of a party album from start to, well, almost finish; the surprisingly dramatic and serious final song only adds to the album’s overall impact however. 4 stars.

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