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RCA | iTunes.com
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Twin spotlights crack through the air, whipping apart the dark clouds gathered overhead.
Twin cannons launch their payloads into the screaming crowd, raining down kaleidoscopic shards of crystalline confetti.
Double Tesla coils flanking the stage begin to hum and glow, rising into the heavens, summoning lightning bolts down to flash and crackle and spit. Thunder rolls along the horizon, pulsing in what is unmistakeably a beat.
Somewhere behind that piercing gaze, diodes are flashing in silence. Somewhere beneath that coif of softest lemon and that burnish of smoothest peach, gears are spinning in perfect unison.
Here she is, amped to the max.
Betty Who: the perfect pop star.
Her laser-bright voice, gilded with electronic shimmer, pierces alike through staccato synths and halos of fluffy pastel. Take Me When You Go sizzles with urgency, with kinetic motion, with separations of time and distance collapsed through the sheer gravity of her voice.
Betty plunges you into the deep indigos of ‘Better’, which crest and swell like a digital ocean storm — she possesses wisdom enough to simulate both when she murmurs, “you look a lot like forever / I’m made of yesterdays”. She beckons you into a gleaming procedurally-generated montage of every high school movie ever on booming anthem ‘Glory Days’, and it’s with absolute sincerity that she begs, “don’t you ever say goodbye”. Whether reminiscing about the past or dreaming of the future, Betty captivates — but the album’s most memorable moments come in screaming present tense. Unfiltered joy splashes from ‘Somebody Loves You’ in sunlit streams of golden yellow, and the outstanding ‘Heartbreak Dream’ bursts and blinds in frenzied white.
Expertly crafted by Sydney-raised Berkelee-trained Jessica Newham, Betty Who gives the overwhelming and fascinating impression of a machine doing an uncanny impression of a human being.
At least on her first album.
Take Me When You Go closes with a spacious, liquid recitative that stands completely apart from the album’s electrifying aesthetic. Betty trickles into the dark earth, still aching and raw and unhealed, but ready to nourish tomorrow’s seeds.
“I love it when you’re lonely /
That’s when we feel the same /
I come around /
I let you down /
Like California rain”
And on Betty’s third album, these seeds have sprouted and borne supple fruit. Dialling down on skyscraping anthems, and dialling up looser, more elastic textures, the boldly-titled Betty is a low-key smash.
The eagle-eared listener may have already seen these shifts telegraphed by each album’s respective cover. Betty shifts from airbrushed perfection to dewey realism, from an elaborate updo to a chic side-shave, from delicate baby blue to rich, honest navy.
(Album number two, The Valley, is an outlier here too: a svelte pair of legs extending coquettishly into the frame, all colour demurely drained. More on that in a moment.)
The primary mood has evolved from magnified mecha-nostalgic to downright flirtatious. Betty is chock-full of flexing comeons like “till there’s nothing between you and me” and “excuse my language / just shut your mouth”. Gone is the laserlight polish and the electro-charged gloss; in are pointed sharp intakes of breath and bucketloads of sass, and one track that shamelessly and gloriously completely rips off Britney Spears’ ‘Oops I Did It Again’.
We’re largely skipping over Betty’s second album today. The Valley unfortunately falls victim to that perennial condition, the sophomore slump. Too many tropes of contemporary pop pull in too many different directions, precipitating an album not without highlights (a translucent, transcendent cover of Donna Lewis’ ‘I Love You Always Forever’ leaps to mind) but largely too taught and too dry.
But two out of three ain’t bad. Still firmly in the first act of what’s sure to be a long and decorated career, Betty can lay claim to a zero-chill digital love letter to eighties pop designed and produced by a neural network, and a slinky modern pop record that keeps the mood on a saucy simmer.
From the premonitions of ‘Dreaming About You’ to the percolations of ‘Ignore Me’, Betty already has much to be proud of. I can’t wait to see what she’ll dream of next.