 |
EMI · Capitol | iTunes.com |
· · ·
Bloom was ranked fifth in my Top Ten Albums I Wrote About in 2018 list, and was awarded the Sade Adu Landline Telephone for Smoothest Operator
· · ·
A fencer wields an épée for a single purpose: to stab one's opponent before one's opponent can stab one back. Each careful footfall, each dodge and lunge and pirouette serves this single purpose. They are not careless decorations. They are motions of furious precision, integral to the goal at hand.
The basic elements of carbohydrate and protein are of little culinary value without the skillset to commingle them into a toothsome arrangement. It takes a deft elegance to whip up a meal from even the finest ingredients, and broad experience to gauge appropriate flourishes of spice and colour. A scandalous sprinkling of walnuts, perhaps a naughty shallot; a frame crucial to the painting it adorns.
Troye Sivan has perfected a third discipline.
His second studio album gleams in contours of black and chrome. Each composition is wrought with utmost care, each like an unsung anthem of the eighties remastered in crisp 4K. What technical limitations once constrained to skeletally efficient arrangements Sivan brings to breathing, beating life: mighty drums drenched in thunderous reverb, dense basslines darkening the horizon where towering guitar lines loom into skies once blurry matte, newly strung with glittering constellations. Sivan crafts wondrous new architectures, impossible intricate, and yet perfectly legible.
His joy shines through the smoke on 'Lucky Strike', his pre-emptive regret spills over the succulent 'Plum', and even when caught in the throes of melancholic lust on 'Animal' he sparkles in sharp resolution. In a daring moment of originality, the radiant title track offers the most artistic deflowering metaphor I've ever heard.
Bloom demonstrates a fearsome fluency in the art of songcraft.
For a master class, look no further than the outstanding lead single, 'My My My'. Note the tight syncopation, thrown into sharp relief by an even reference counterpoint. Observe how the entire song delicately strings tension, gliding between the dominant and the subdominant, never allowing that tension to release by resolving to the tonic. Luxuriate in those sultry vocals that soften ecstasy and misery alike into a dark-eyed smoulder: "Spark up, buzzcut / I've got my tongue between your teeth". Like all pop stars, he experiences life amplified, supersaturated, magnified in all dimensions. The casual carelessness with which he throws out pitch-perfect witticisms and remarks is almost perverse.
For his next trick, Sivan cleverly counterfeits tenderness on 'The Good Side', where folksy guitar noodling suggests intimacy while wraithlike vocals coil like cold vapour in the distance. The only honesty comes from a vocoded clone choir of background Sivans.
Excluding bonus tracks, Bloom wraps up in a scant thirty-seven minutes, charting a journey from skyscraping highs to abyssal lows. This indispensible skill is also the rarest: restraint. But most importantly of all, Sivan is blessed with that ineffable, inimitable quality of cool. Honest but never overbearing, relatable but never oversharing (a remarkable balance to strike given that album opener 'Seventeen' chronicles a sexual experience with an older man) he can count himself among the chicest of today's upper echelon of pop. He certainly looks the part: a willowy twink draped in drop-shouldered tees, topped with a mop of dashingly tousled platinum blonde, and at just twenty-three years old, he hits that demographic crossover sweet spot. Sivan appeals alike to an established industry and a fervent digital fanbase.
And folks, he gets it. Nobody needed to primp and prune and focus-test these songs. He's been to heaven and back, and it shows. The mind wanders to other household names in pop, other people who share Sivan's bewitching lyricism, breathtaking candidness and total command of form and function. Ever the underdog, Taylor Swift spins richly detailed yarns that capture astonishing emotional specificity, whether accompanied by tinny banjo on her earlier work or megacalibre synths on the radiant 1989 and the ruthless Reputation. With just a few short lines, she can do what lesser poets can only dream of. Last year Lorde, whose flair for vicious intimacy earned her second place in my Top Ten Albums I Wrote About in 2017, compressed her agony into a glowing knot of emotion — Melodrama is a landmark album of the decade. Both she and Sivan are acolytes of Drake's low-key noir-pop, each cultivating their own unique aesthetic by gouging out the chill and reforging its conduits with smoking liquid passion.
Bloom reaches its Drakiest peak on a dusky recitative that spotlights A-list guest star Ariana Grande. She makes a winningly understated appearance on 'Dance to This', a brisk but genuine ode to ditching the claustrophobic clubs for the privacy of home: "Push up on my body / You know we've already seen all of the parties / We can just dance to this". The image recalls vintage Red-era Swift, where she too "danc[ed] around the kitchen in the refrigerator light". Grande smartly chooses not to access the upper octaves of her clarion voice, the whistle register that has drawn comparisons to Whitney and Mariah across her own considerable discography, opting to complement rather than overshadow her friend. Just a few weeks ago, Grande made a solid case for consistency of texture on the astringent Sweetener. She can still blow you away when she wants, as on Dangerous Woman's overconfident but irresistible selection of pop bangers. (The ink-dark 'Into You' is 2016's biggest smash that never was.) When Grande and Sivan slink into the bridge of 'Dance to This', they remind us that we contain multitudes.
Skills such as the tasteful curation of guest stars are not a recent expansion of Sivan's repertoire. His 2015 debut album Blue Neighbourhood featured du jour starlet Alessia Cara, moonlit electronica sculpters Broods, as well as delightful human sunbeam Betty Who. Among its bountiful boasts, Blue Neighbourhood also confirmed Sivan's mastery of the drop. The final act of 'Fools' erupts into pixelated effervescence, 'Bite' channels velveteen gothstep into genuine menace, and a Sierpinski breakdown sends 'Heaven' splintering into skittering fractals. Though his technical skills reached maturity some time ago, Bloom sets itself apart with a sense of intangible joy, the overarching relish with which Sivan dives into each new track. It's right there in the title: Blue Neighbourhood was domestic and sad; an album that explored the weightless anxieties that lurk between outgrowing childhood and embracing adulthood, an album that embraced what burgeoning comfort small joys could bring in the yawning liminal space.
In the last three years, Sivan has soaked up the lovelight and photosynthesised a formidable contender for best pop album of the year. It cannot be overstated how important it is to see a young gay man operating on these levels. I can't think of a single other mainstream male pop star who croons about boys the way Sivan does (i.e. superbly, and vulnerably), and Bloom is a stellar example of explicit queer representation that we can't take for granted.
Most thrilling of all is that Sivan is just getting started. He's shooting for the moon, and we've barely left the atmosphere. Bloom is a consummate sophomore album, a record of loss and love and just terrific bangers. And it is a stratospheric checkpoint. His Melodrama is his future. His 1989 is yet to come.
But for now, Sivan is a talent to be reckoned with, fully unfurled and ready to drink up the sunshine.