Rare/ Selena Gomez - pop



By Narendra Kusnur

Album: Rare
Artiste: Selena Gomez
Genre: Pop
Label: Interscope Records
Rating: ****

Four years after her last record Revival, American singer-actress Selena Gomez comes out with her new collection Rare. In the meanwhile, she's suffered from lupus, a neurological disorder, undergone treatment for depression and anxiety, and broken up with her exes Justin Bieber and The Weeknd.

This 14-track collection thus contains a mix of songs on past relationships and tunes that talk of her fightback. It's a very young-audience-friendly set, with a simple pop sound and occasional doses of dance flavour. Her Christina Aguilera singing influence and Bruno Mars composition style are evident on many numbers.

“Baby, you’ve been so distant from me lately, And lately, don’t wanna call you baby,” she sings on the opening title track, before saying somebody else will accept her for being rare. The mood continues on ‘Lose You To Love Me’, which goes, “We’d always go into it blindly, I needed to lose you to love me; The dancing was killing me softly, I needed to hate you to love me”. On ‘People You Know’, she makes digs at exes with the words, “We used to be close, but people can go, from people you know to people you don’t”.

Gomez gets into optimistic mode on ‘Dance Again’, as the lines say it “feels so good to dance again”. She collaborates with rapper Kid Cudi on ‘A Sweeter Place’, where she brims with hope-filled lines like, “We will find our way, we will find the things we seek”.

From the musical viewpoint, ‘Ring’ has a Hollywood musical feel, whereas ‘Let Me Get Me’ has a Latino flavour. ‘Look At Her Now’ has a clubby dance-pop flavour, and ‘Crowded Room’ has a hip-hop stretch by 6LACK, lending a bit of variety.

Though some may find a heard-it-before feeling on some songs, the good thing about Rare is that there are no fillers and the songs flow seamlessly. The emotions are easy to relate to, and this should work well with those in their teens or 20s.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gig review/ Deep Purple in Bengaluru

Image
BY NARENDRA KUSNUR  Deep Purple at Bandland  Genre : Rock Details : Bandland rock festival, Embassy International Riding School, Bengaluru, December 17 Organisers : BookMyShow Live  Rating : **** 1/2 We all came out to Bandland, on a Bengaluru riding ground, to shoot videos on a mobile, yeah, capture the classic rock sound. Ian Gillan and the Purples, were at the best place around, space-truckin' on a black night, we danced on dusty ground.. singing, Smoke On The Water, drones in the sky, Smoke On The Water... taan taan taan, taan taan tadaan, taan taan tadaan, taan taan... Three days after British rockers Deep Purple enchanted the crowd at the Bandland rock festival in Bengaluru, the gooseflesh lingers like the whiff of cologne. For many, they have been college heroes, cocktail companions, the kings of melodic power, the epitome of hard rock. Older-generation fans or youngsters, they knew many of these songs by heart. Every word, every instrumental passage, every back-up vocal lin
Read more

Gig review/ Sting @ Lollapalooza

Image
BY NARENDRA KUSNUR   Sting @   Lollapalooza   Genre : Rock/ pop-rock Details : Mahalakshmi Race Course, Mumbai, January 28 Rating : **** You'll forget the sun in its jealous sky, as we walk on fields of gold... The sun had set a long ago, and the walk had been tiring and endless. But everything changed around 8.20 pm when Gordon Sumner aka Sting marched on to the Budweiser stage with a message in a bottle. For the next 85 minutes, every little thing the Englishman in Mumbai did was magic. The green carpet in front of the stage had been converted into fields of gold. The hardcore Sting fans should get those puns, and there were plenty of them who watched his concluding act at the two-day Lollapalooza music festival at the Mahalakshmi Race Course, Mumbai, on Sunday. Some had attended his shows abroad, some were seeing him for the first time, and others had been present at Mumbai's Rang Bhavan in 1980, when he played with his band The Police, or at the Amnesty International festiv
Read more

Gig review/ L. Shankar

Image
BY NARENDRA KUSNUR Artiste : L Shankar & Group Concert : Aditya Birla Group Masters of Music  Genre : Fusion/ Carnatic  Details : June 16, Jamshed Bhabha Theatre, Mumbai  Rating : ***** The sudden excitement was palpable when violinist L. Shankar announced that he and his group would play many Shakti tunes at Sunday's concert in Mumbai. He had already opened the evening with a dazzling rendition of Carnatic composer Muthuswamy Dikshitar's 'Vathapi Ganapathim', and if one thought he would focus on classical fare, that was not to be. Five of the remaining six pieces belonged to the repertoire of the original Shakti line-up, comprising him, guitarist John McLaughlin, tabla genius Zakir Hussain and ghatam maestro Vikku Vinayakram. Together, they had pioneered the Indo-jazz fusion sound in the 1970s, before going different paths over a decade later. Playing those old Shakti classics had a major issue though, at least for fans. They had originally been written for two mel
Read more