Is This The Most Savage ‘Pitchfork’ Review of the Year?
Liam Payne's 'LP1' has been described as the soundtrack to a Zara changing room.
Earlier this month, Liam Payne of One Direction fame released LP1, his solo debut. Days later, he was mauled in the press.
The reviews have been unanimously bad. The Independent likened the thing to a cheap rental car, Variety to Justin Timberlake’s widely-reviled Man of the Woods, and The Guardian to the work of an “uptight old scold.”
But all of those reviews pale in comparison to the critical savaging doled out to him by Rawiya Kameir of Pitchfork, who scorches the record with a ferocity perhaps hitherto unimaginable.
Kameir starts by going right for the jugular, noting that Simon Cowell assembled One Direction as a boy band because he had limited faith in their solo abilities. “If Liam Payne’s debut, released more than a decade after the band’s televised genesis, is any indication, Cowell was right,” Kameir notes.
These songs belong in a Zara fitting room https://t.co/KNgfyIpbsd
— Pitchfork (@pitchfork) December 16, 2019
The biggest problem the writer has with the record is its bland, shape-shifting aimlessness. Unlike Harry Styles or even Zayn, both of whom have marked out a specific category for themselves, Payne has tried to appeal to the radio-friendly mainstream — to his detriment.
“There are layered R&B harmonies, vaguely Latin rhythms, and compressed synths as melody, but … Payne only gasps at his radio-ready effectiveness,” Kameir writes.
As these things tend to go, it’s the final paragraph that really drives the knife in deepest. After noting that the song’s one attempt at lust is both boring and deeply offensive, insinuating that bisexual women are cheap and easy, Kameir pronounces a final judgement on the entire project.
“If you can’t effectively use a pop song to communicate horniness, the most basic of human emotions, then what do you have? Listening to LP1, you almost feel sorry for Payne. It’s maybe more pathetic to have failed not for risking too much, but after seeming to have tried so little.”
Ooft.
the pitchfork liam payne review is the funniest thing i've read all month pic.twitter.com/YUglaGGzRP
— 𝘬𝘪𝘵 🌻👻 (@kitnotmarlowe) December 16, 2019
The only other Pitchfork reviews released this year that even come close to those barbed lows is a review of Sad Planets’ Akron, Ohio and a savaging of Cigarettes After Sex’s Cry. In the former, writer Allison Hussey unloads on the side project of The Black Keys’ Patrick Carney, calling it a “graceless, unsubtle pastiche of rock’n’roll indulgence.”
“Even in their failures, their efforts are not outstanding,” Hussey writes. “Sad Planets are the latest curdled dregs of a trope that spoiled long ago.”
Meanwhile, Sophie Kemp calls Cry a hollow and ultimately unpleasant experience. “Cry is a soulless and Styrofoam record as hollow as a booty-call text at 3 a.m. ‘Hey sexy, you up?’ the record seems to beckon. It’s hardly an inviting proposition.”
Goodness. Guess it’s really not true that all press is good press.