There are few things so delicious in pop than a singer that looks like your garden variety pop tart poppet but starts fires in your mind as soon as you hear her because she clearly has no faith in the “power of pop” and so tears it apart to suit her ends and make it her own. Those are the sorts of moments that tend to make critics feel a little funny in the pants and (as was the case both with Liz Phair and M.I.A.) have a habit of making legends and – wouldn't you know it? – that's exactly what both singer Kate Miller-Heidke and her sophomore album (first for the Australian singer in North America), Curiouser, are all about.
It's difficult to explain just how Miller-Heidke pulls off the total subversion of pop conventions the way she that does on Curiouser, but it's a fantastic thing to hear in practice; from the opening stomp-of-a-beat that kicks off “The One Thing I Know,” the singer strips the normally lush, overdone and gaudy song structure that pop usually employs down to little more than a tittering, fluttering vocal melody and a beat with any other instrumentation added only occasionally for punctuation and to kiss listeners with a fist before kissing them off. The delivery of the vocals themselves takes the timbre of a prim and proper uptown girl and it's very infectious until listeners realize they're singing along to lines like, “My hunger for the fire that gathers in your eyes,” thus implying that the singer is actually stalking her interest.
These are the sorts of twists that listeners are lining themselves up for and, as long as they know that, the album begins to sound golden in its backhanded beauty.
That's a good start – there's no doubt about that – but it gets even better as the record progresses. Immediately following “The One Thing I Know,” Miller-Heidke digs into the “other” gender using the same stripped and textural sounds which makes lines line “If you're god's gift to women, god got it wrong” bite all that much deeper in addition to being a defiant anthem for the dumped. To seemingly add insult to injury, the singer follows that introductory salvo with the (sort of) pop-punk of “I Like You Better When You're Not Around” which hits like the most petulant and scathing kind of chaser in spite of its saccharine-encrusted delivery; it's miserable, it's mean, it's great.
From there, each song on Curiouser gets progressively more musical (“Motorscooter” might end up being the prize seller for TOMOS if the company puts the song in an ad campaign) while not losing too much of its' bite. Even so, the energy goes back up exponentially when “Politics Of Space” falls back into the early operating patterns on the record. The cross of light electro-clash and college rock continues easily through the close of the record, but Miller-Heidke gets one last good kick in at the unnamed evil male's sack in the final bonus track, “Are You F*cking Kidding Me.” The song is the ultimate money shot with which to close the book on the record; a bitingly critical and wildly funny slash against Facebook (ever have an ex add you? So, apparently, has the singer) as well as being a vicious attack on the stupidity of social pleasantry. It's fucking brilliant and the perfect end note for this introduction of Kate Miller-Heidke to North American audiences.
Of course, with such a strong show, the question turns to what will happen now. Curiouser was originally released in Australia in October, 2008 (the bonus live tracks included on this North American release likely originated on Miller-Heidke's 2009 live album, Live at The Hi-Fi) so it stands to reason that whatever is released as a follow-up to Curiouser may be a very different creature. Those hooked by this album will have to keep a close ear on the land Down Under and hope that the singer builds upon what she's laid down on Curiouser; the ideas are too good to just let drop.
Artist:
www.katemillerheidke.com/
www.myspace.com/katemillerheidke
Download:
Kate Miller-Heidke – “Are You F*cking Kidding Me” – Curiouser
Album:
Curiouser is out now. Buy it here on Amazon .
