Kesha is Healed (Again)
Though it’s a career milestone, Kesha’s first album as an independent artist feels like an ellipsis in a career marked by stop-starts. It’s overall uneven, yet it glimmers with hard-won optimism.
If the central conceit of . (hereafter referred to as Period) sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Billed as Kesha’s first independently released record – she was previously signed to Kemosabe, the label owned by her alleged abuser – Period purports to hit the reset button after a decade-long legal battle that threatened to overshadow her artistic achievements. Yet this doesn’t sound dissimilar to Kesha’s two previous albums (Gag Order excluded): 2017’s Rainbow, essentially Kesha’s Sweetener, was a light and optimistic effort dropped in the midst of said legal battle; meanwhile, the pandemic-released High Road was chock-full of tracks you could plausibly find under a playlist entitled ‘Unapologetic Workout Mix’. (That’s not a diss – ‘Birthday Suit’ is a genuinely great song to run to.)
All this is to say that Period’s fourth of July release date felt a little trite upon its announcement. We’ve seen this before, I thought. (That’s no slant against Kesha’s personal triumphs, simply a comment on the repackaging of her narrative of independence.) How I feel about the album itself is an extension of how I feel about the choice of release date: though the sentiments of independence and liberation are charming (and undoubtedly hard-won), the record itself is basic and uneven in its execution, torn between sounds that often house regrettably underdeveloped lyrics. If one were optimistic, it might be referred to as iconoclastic; I’d choose the word ‘confused’.
Much of Period’s duration consists of self-love anthems, which are notoriously difficult to get right. ‘thank u, next’ remains a holy grail of this microgenre, a winning cocktail of confidence and detached cool atop refreshingly blissed out R&B. Crucially, it understands the common failure of many a self-love song; it’s so easy to fall into the trap of being cringe á la Rachel Platten’s ‘Fight Song’ or, more recently, Lizzo. Unfortunately, Period often falls victim to the cliché inclinations of the self-love song. ‘THE ONE.’, the worst offender, offers that Kesha is – get this! – the one she’s been looking for all along, romantic suitor be damned. The issue isn’t that the realisation itself is invalid (don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled for Kesha that she’s reclaiming her narrative), but that its lyrical presentation – particularly across such a bland, royalty free-sounding instrumental – simply doesn’t compel the way it deserves to.
Period sonically tends to veer strangely pedestrian. Alongside ‘THE ONE.’, fit for the outro of a YouTube unboxing video, sits ‘YIPPEE-KI-YAY.’, a paltry stab at the stomp-and-holler fever dominating our charts – like Alex Warren if he threw a rager and encouraged everyone to get their tits out. Yet the song itself lacks the bite its lyrics yearn for. There’s also ‘DELUSIONAL.’, which – though more listenable than the aforementioned – nestles snugly in the safety net of big mid-‘10s power ballads (oddly enough, the chorus reminds me of ‘Flashlight’ from Pitch Perfect 2).
I say ‘strangely’ when describing Period’s conventional nature because, though Kesha’s songs do skew formulaic in structure, her image has often positioned her as an outsider or a rebel – the Hamilton to Katy Perry’s Burr. As transgressive as you can be as a pop star, Kesha was (and still, in parts of Period, is) it: take ‘Tik Tok’, a signature song of hers, which had rap-lite verses and almost graphically hedonistic lyrics. (‘Graphically’ is a hyperbolic descriptor, I’m aware, but you tell me another top-forty hit that references brushing one’s teeth with Jack Daniels.) The key to her rebellious nature was how natural it seemed to come to her.
Here, though, the stabs at being transgressive simply scan as hollow; the liberal deployment of the word ‘fuck’ in various forms, and the thematic recurrence of getting naked, remind me of the moments on Taylor Swift’s Midnights where curse words felt shoehorned into lyrics that didn’t need them. This isn’t to imply that records about sex, or filled with cursing, aren’t valuable – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, controversial as its maker is, uses both these elements to great effect – it’s to say that Period’s use of them simply feels unnecessary. (I keep returning to the bizarre mic-drop of ‘my fucking nice house’ on ‘GLOW.’, if only to sit and consider how aggressively nice said house must be.)
Most bewilderingly, Period’s best songs don’t jell with the conceptual narrative. Excellent lead single ‘JOYRIDE.’ is a barn-burner of a tune, roaring into action like a still-cool Regina George pulling up to whisk you away. The thrilling, synthy ‘BOY CRAZY.’, is punchy and knowingly silly the way that all of Kesha’s best songs are: ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme all the boys’, she growls, ‘I’ve been a good girl, now I’m a connoisseur’. As great as these songs are, though, it’s difficult to place them in the grander context of Kesha’s healing journey. They feel like the best proof-of-concepts from an album that feels like a prototype of a better one – which might explain why those moments feel so out of place.
That’s not to discredit the stylistic deviations from Kesha’s usual form – the polka inflections on ‘JOYRIDE.’, for instance, are a welcome touch – but more often than not, the record’s all-over-the-place nature makes for a jarring listening experience. This is an issue most prevalent on opener ‘FREEDOM.’, which itself careens from tasteful (the piano refrain, the gospel singers featured on the chorus) to misplaced (the unnecessarily long ambient intro, the underwritten verses). The overarching impression is that of a Lego approach to songwriting, whereby bits that work are pressed together with bits that don’t.
The songwriting, in terms of lyrics, is a curious nut to crack. On some occasions, Kesha embraces the silly and unhinged provocations the album concept seems to suggest, gamely accepting her status as honorary caregiver to millions of gays on ‘JOYRIDE.’ (‘You want kids? Well, I am mother!’) and playing the character of horny devil on ‘BOY CRAZY.’ (‘Boys better beware, I'm on a man tear’.) In other places, though, it hews closer to basic, as she refers to herself as her own saviour on more than one occasion, and drops a few lyrical clunkers here and there; the otherwise earnest closer ‘CATHEDRAL.’ is marred by a few such stinkers, namely: ‘Hope is a madman that lives in my mind’.
In terms of sheer hook power, though, Period finds Kesha firing on all cylinders. As well as the surefire bangers of ‘JOYRIDE.’ and ‘BOY CRAZY.’, ‘FREEDOM.’ – in spite of its bric-a-brac composition – has a robust, stirring chorus, exhibiting a rare marriage of concept to execution. Kesha’s message of liberation is not only compelling but genuinely enjoyable, as opposed to moments like ‘THE ONE.’, which are more reminiscent of your friend showing you photos of their new baby. Of course, you’re overjoyed for them, but that emotion is inevitably overridden by one of boredom.
There are two wholly successful syntheses of theme and production, nestled within Period’s back half. ‘LOVE FOREVER.’ is warm and lively, glimmering with the hard-won optimism that the whole of the album dabbles in; the gorgeous ‘TOO HARD.’, meanwhile, is more cautious, offering a darker nuance to Kesha’s narrative of freedom. The writing is spare yet evocative, with Kesha declaring: ‘I refuse to let your darkness take the light out of me.’ This is what Period wants to be, an inviting body of work that plays to Kesha’s strengths while blazing a path forward for her career. It purports to be a document of healing in the vein of Lemonade, but comes off as more of an Eat, Pray, Love: undoubtedly fulfilling for its creator, but ultimately too varnished and insular to properly compel. It wants to be a lighthouse of optimism; it ends up being no bigger than a ring light.
5/10
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