10 hours ago
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Don’t worry, James Murphy. This is what it really sounds like when you have no edge.
Harry Styles has never been an especially substantial artist. The former One Direction singer has spent his solo career trying on aesthetics for aesthetics’ sake, projecting blandly inoffensive charisma while performing blandly inoffensive music. He seems like a nice guy: charming, polite, respectful to his elders, with a genuine interest in learning and self-improvement. But as a celebrity, he’s been less a musical artist than a professional beautiful person, a sensitive fashion plate with an unintrusive soundtrack following him everywhere he goes. His name also works as a sentence explaining his modus operandi.
All style, no substance is not necessarily a problem for pop stars. There’s more than a little space in this world for music that’s just plain fun, that exists exclusively as a pleasure delivery system. Lots of days, I’ll take fluff that gets the party started over attempts to be deep, and sometimes I prefer it over music that actually is deep. But Styles doesn’t give us that kind of euphoria, either. His music is professional and eminently ignorable. It’s never bad enough to hate, but it almost always falls short of the rapture provided by pop music at its best.
Now, it gets to fall short of the Rapture, too. For his new album Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally, Styles pulled inspiration from his experience at an LCD Soundsystem concert. The timing is surprising considering that the formerly ultra-cool electronic rock band’s cachet has never been lower, but in theory, this is a splendid idea. LCD Soundsystem made some amazing records, and their live show remains exhilarating. I love the idea of James Murphy’s music imprinting itself on a pop superstar who’s now the same age Murphy was when he started the project. As a middle-aged white guy whose neural pathways were molded by Pitchfork in the 2000s, I feel like he is pandering to me personally.
But this is not the DFA-damaged new-gen FutureSex LoveSounds of my imagination. In the hands of Styles and his collaborators, all those pulsing synths and percolating drum machines do not add up to a transcendent experience. Kiss All The Time is 42 minutes of rhythms, textures, and vibes in search of a single compelling song. It is the sound of the nebulous concept of good taste being hollowed out into an empty vessel — a reverse “Emperor’s New Clothes” situation where the clothes are the only thing there. And clothing really does seem to be Kiss All The Time’s highest calling. Credit where it’s due, this stuff is going to sound incredible when you’re trying on expensive pants.
The album could have worked if there were hooks. Barring that, even some personality might have jolted these tracks to life. But Kiss All The Time is bereft of both melody and idiosyncrasy. Styles wanders through these intricately constructed soundscapes without conviction, drowsily spouting platitudes like “Can you hear the voice, the one inside your head?” and “It’s all waiting there for you.”
There are fleeting glimpses of real human connection, like the symphonic ballad “Coming Up Roses,” with its portrait of a doomed romantic fling. A few tracks have enough skip in their step to liven up the album’s back half, like the shuffling “Pop” and the vacuum-sealed disco-funk jam “Dance No More.” But on the whole, Styles was really onto something when he kicked off 2022’s Harry’s House with a tune called “Music For A Sushi Restaurant.” These songs are sonic wallpaper. You might find yourself mumbling them to yourself at the grocery store, but they never leap out of the speakers.
Styles hasn’t always been so melodically inert. “As It Was,” the biggest hit of his career, overflowed with hooks, from its A-ha-indebted keyboard line to its Vampire Weekend-evoking chorus. That song is no masterpiece, but there’s a reason it lasted 15 weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, whereas this album’s lead single “Aperture” debuted atop the chart on the strength of public curiosity then plummeted like a phantom Travis Scott hit. “Aperture” is a non-song, a wash of strobing keyboards and skittering beats with a shrug where the chorus should be. It’s shaped like an anthem, but there’s no there there.
So it goes throughout most of the tracklist. The bass-bombed “Ready, Steady, Go!” is the kind of song an indie sleaze revival band in a Netflix drama might come up with, or maybe an actual post-peak 2000s dance-punk band buried deep on a late-season O.C. soundtrack. The shapeshifting “Season 2 Weight Loss” comes tantalizingly close to Hot Chip but lacks the pizzazz to leave an impression. “Did you get your taste back? Or do you just need a little love?” Styles asks a paramour who’s decamped to Paris on “Taste Back,” an appropriate question for songs whose chic influences can’t hide their underdeveloped writing.
The buck stops at Styles, but a whole group of folks are liable for the album’s failure to ascend beyond mere competence. In a recent Runner’s World interview discussing his burgeoning hobby as a marathoner, Styles compared the solitary pursuit that is long-distance racing with the collaborative effort that is big-budget pop stardom: “No one can run a marathon for you. Whereas there are a lot of people who help me make music, put the music out, put on a show and make me look good at it!” With that in mind, we need to hold Kid Harpoon to account.
The British producer born Tom Hull has become Styles’ closest collaborator. After contributing to a couple tracks on Styles’ 2017 self-titled debut, he co-wrote and produced most of 2019’s Fine Line and all of 2022’s Harry’s House, with involvement from Colorado-born Tyler Johnson about half the time. That configuration continues here, and dang, these guys left Styles out to dry. A New York Times feature about Hull today reveals how he brought legends like Can and the Durutti Column to bear on Kiss All The Time and got contributors like the Smile’s Tom Skinner involved. I just wish he would have taken some of the energy he spent making the album sound cool and applied it to the fundamentals of pop songwriting instead.
With that in mind, Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally is at its best on “American Girls.” The production is vivid: a squelching, thumping “Someone Great”-meets-“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” situation with some gorgeous glassy piano chords and a contagious sense of motion. The chorus boasts an actual shout-along melody, as Styles belts out, “‘I've known you for ages,’ it's all that I've heard/ My friends are in love with American girls.” Yet even this highlight can’t help but feel like a retread of a more accomplished song by a more interesting act.
A decade ago, the 1975 — noted James Murphy disciples in their own right — poured all kinds of pathos and cheeky humor into “She’s American,” an ’80s pastiche that popped and fizzed with the best of them. It's not the only 1975 song that comes to mind when "American Girls" is playing. Maybe Matty Healy drives you mad, but the second I remember an artist that audacious and eccentric exists, Styles’ small victories here start to pale. Similarly, the disappointment is compounded by Styles dropping this album the same day Olivia Rodrigo released her own aging-hipster bait, an achingly beautiful Magnetic Fields cover from the new HELP(2) compilation. Rodrigo has repeatedly demonstrated how today’s pop stars can let classic punk and alt-rock inform their music without getting lost in a cloud of prestige. Her music is fun and quirky and personal and bracingly alive, and her stellar take on “The Book Of Love” is another reminder that Styles could do so much better.
In the grand arc of Styles’ career, it probably doesn’t matter whether Kiss All The Time is any good. The guy may be too big to fail. Stevie Nicks presumably still has his back, as does apparently the entire corporate entertainment apparatus. His infinite residency at Madison Square Garden — notably, the same venue where LCD staged their farewell concert — will probably sell out thanks to stans, FOMO, and the magnetism of celebrity. But when that happens, the relevant Murphy composition will not be “All My Friends” or “Dance Yrself Clean” or even “North American Scum.” When I hear of all those people crowding into the arena to see this music performed, I will think to myself, “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down.”
Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally is out now via Columbia.
English (US) · 