Carly Rae Jepsen – ‘E.MO.TION’

Call Me Mae Maybsen has taken some time to bask in the wake of that 2012 pop juggernaut, in order to craft a third album with which she is now starting to subtly storm back out onto the scene. It’s all very exciting, and whispers of ‘album of the year’ are only growing louder and louder. But how could this be, from someone relegated to a mere one-hit-wonder?

The simple answer is Carly Rae Jepsen is, in fact, an amazing singer-songwriter of popular music. E.MO.TION is a superb album. Yes, thematically, the usual suspects love and relationships dominate, but musically we’re taken back to both the 80s and the 90s, with Jepsen channelling Cindy Lauper and working with a wide range of producers – even co-writing with Sia(!)

Admittedly, this summer’s fun first single ‘I Really Like You’ was an easy, radio-friendly choice that hoped to pick up where ‘Call Me Maybe’ left off – a Call Me Back, if you will. The 80s production did at least hint, however, at what was to come, and this album actually dives off in a number of totally different directions, even slipping in a few of Carly’s experimental, less sugary moments.

The next single to be taken from the album was the glorious ‘Run Away With Me’. The video follows Carly to locations she has chosen to ‘run away’ to (read: go on an envy-inducing holiday) and its minimal aesthetic harks back to a pre-Instagram era of world travel, a video hell-bent on ramping up the nostalgia of its accompanying track – particularly that yearning saxophone melody. Yet ultimately this video doesn’t do this pop-titan enough justice.

‘I Really Like You’ was an easy, radio-friendly choice that hoped to pick up where ‘Call Me Maybe’ left off – a Call Me Back, if you will

Though virtually the entire album has a delightful 80s tinge, this seems to come to a head in the title track and sax-infused ‘Let’s Get Lost’. It also shines through in the synths rolling in half-way through ‘Love Again’, which, along with a chorus that achieves an instant familiarity, make the track incredibly addictive. In keeping with this is the defiant and punchy ‘Making The Most Of The Night’, the chorus of which you will be unsurprised to learn is co-written by the mighty Sia, who also leant her hand to ‘Boy Problems’.

‘Boy Problems’ is, however, amazing in a different way: a blasé Carly bitches about her friends who call her up to, in turn, bitch about their endless boy problems. Gently mocking the banality of a theme so heavily present in both Jepsen’s own work and in popular music at large, this ironic 90s-pop throwback combines layered vocals with a Daft Punk-esque bassline in an irresistible celebration of Jepsen’s self-aware romantic streak.

Sometimes the album shows experimentation that doesn’t immediately smack of Jepsen’s usual style at all, like the electro production on ‘L.A Hallucinations’. This particular track oozes a new kind of confidence for Carly – who even professes just how over Buzzfeed culture she is – while still sounding, at times, a bit like a tune you might have had playing on your Gameboy Colour. For comparison, ‘All That’ is slower, and more of a soul-bearing, Prince-inspired ballad. Then there’s the vaguely hypnotic ‘Warm Blood’ which some people will hail as the best song on the album (and others won’t really be too fussed about), purely because it intrigues as the most obviously different track on the album, and is produced by Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend.

‘Your Type’ resembles the sounds of the hugely successful 1989 enough to provoke the inevitable ANGRY CAPS LOCK YOUTUBE COMMENTS

While two of the same producers who worked on Taylor Swift’s latest album are also at work on ‘Run Away With Me’, it is actually ‘Your Type’ that resembles the sounds of the hugely successful 1989 enough to provoke the inevitable ANGRY CAPS LOCK YOUTUBE COMMENTS. For most, though, this will fail to detract from the fact that the song, for all its unrequited love clichés, has an oddly, refreshingly bitchy tone and remains a totally enjoyable listen.

Indeed, Carly Rae seems to get a lot of criticism for not really having a personality brand that penetrates every single slice of her work like other mega-popstars do – not shocking since ‘Call Me Maybe’ was so all-consuming that, like the worst examples from nature, she was swallowed up by her own creation). Regardless, the quality of this album speaks for itself, but sadly the industry’s love of a packaged icon means that her relative brandlessness may not sell all that well. This would be a shame, because E.MO.TION shows off new sides to her talent and directs her far away, though thankfully not too much, from that knowingly familiar hit she had about asking a boy to call her… And how she felt about it… Which is, you know, the kind of thing that her annoying friends won’t stop calling her about.