Her voice—versatile, elastic—bends into every role in her ever-expanding one-woman show: the nostalgic romantic watching sunsets and singing clever falsetto on “Lullaby,” the melodramatic valley girl (“Like, oh my god”) in “Loose”. Justin Risen, Junky StarHer co-production provides a richer backdrop for her versatile vocals, pushing beyond her Roland to include guitar, piano and percussion. Raisen, who helped shape the sounds of Sky Ferreira, Kim Gordon, Yves Tumor and Charli XCX, brings a similar controlled chaos to the album. “Burn Bridges” packs a range of styles into exactly two minutes – shimmering tro-house beats, freestyle freakouts, bigger prog rock percussion – sometimes switching between the two in the same verse. On “Shelly,” Raisen builds a power-pop paradise with a looping guitar groove, building from a central riff like the Go-Gos with a loop pedal. Raisen, the self-proclaimed “Dr. Dre of trash,” is a natural fit for Ives' experimental pop, tipping the balance with a cartoonish drum fill or helium-high vocals whenever things veer toward conventional pop structures.
The diversity of styles can sometimes make for a disjointed listen, but at 10 songs in less than 30 minutes, it's never boring. Ives writes in the mold set by the production style on each track. the album feels more like a collection of small, discrete episodes than a serial narrative. There's the racy rocker in “Shelly,” who frequents restaurants and has a thing for red lips. “I wanna 1-2-3-4-5 her,” he sings about the apple of her eye with his giddy energy Rick Springfield the Tommy Tutone. And “Burn Bridges” is not just a pop song, but a song about pop. She sings her praises the 109 instrument and writes about a love song that sounds like “'White Iverson' but with the toms on the one” (followed by a Phil Collins-esque, tom-heavy fill). In “Back in LA,” he finds himself in the emotion of a woman on the opposite shore: “She turns right,” he sighs, a shock to any native New Yorker.
Junky Star it's like a pop-up book, each song springing into a life of its own and then ending as quickly as it began. But there's a recurring motif throughout the album, too—longing for a life worth living and the stillness needed to appreciate that life. for everything he claimed to have “revealed”. 2nd, still searching for self-acceptance. “What a mess, what a wonderful mess,” she sings on “Lullaby,” not maddened, but thoughtful. “It's nothing to be sad about/It's just something I've been thinking about.” Ives may not be on the precipice of superstardom, but she is, in her own way, an embodiment of her album title: a flashy star, rough around the edges but still shining with an unstoppable light.
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