The Hope Six Demolition Project

1 review

• 4.0
  Marcus ViniciusNov 2, 20261 play

  Expectation usually kills the experience, and with this album, PJ was a victim of her brilliance. We expect PJ to be bombastic, to twist our heads, to come up with nothing we heard from her before. It happened with her 3 early albums where she approached aggresiveness, sex and devotion through different lens, the electronic approach on Is This Desire?, the melancholia on her guitar-less piano-led "White Chalk" and the strongly political folk album "Let England Shake", but with Hope Six, PJ continues the path she created with its predecessor, it feels natural, it feels like a continuation, these melodies aren't daring if you hear it from PJ, she probably could do these melodies on her sleep and that's what bug us, PJ isn't pushing her own boundaries here, she's just releasing another album. It's a PJ album, that's for sure, and that's why it's fucking great. Yeah, it's a great album, it has brilliant moments. The urgency of the opener, the broken saxophones, the suspense and thrilling atmosphere from "The Ministry of Defence", the pessimistic tone, the way she perceive things and passes onto us as a mere spectator, she doesn't give any hope to us, she's saying "the world is fucked up, here, see it, it's miserable, but I couldn't do anything remarkable and probably neither will you do", she's throwing that on our faces and that makes us feel impotent. Why didn't she gave hope to us while singing about the starving boy on "Dollar, Dollar?", because it would be a lie, there isn't hope for that boy, she couldn't give it to him. In the process, though, she sounds apathetic, she doesn't really connect to the album, she's just singing and passing information she gathered from her trip to us. Probabbly that didn't made the trick for most of people, because we expect our PJ to be head over heels towards what she's singing, to put herself right on the middle of the hurricane, we expect her to stomp and spin around ferociously the themes, but she doesn't do that here and that's not appealing to most of people, people don't like apathetic albums. Adds that to the fact that this isn't musically different from her latest, we'll be disappointed. I'm mildly disappointed, a bit, I still listened and am addicted to many melodies here, but it's not the stellar album I expected. I expected an AOTY, right on first listen, something that blew me out of the water, but I didn't, I got a top 15 album, that slowly grew on me, bit by bit. It's not an easy album although it feels easy, it's uncomfortable, we don't feel really [i]in[/i] the music, and that's the "point" of the album. I get why people didn't get attached to this, I for one, really liked this and I can settle with this being "just" a PJ album (""""just""""" because a PJ album is still a great album, huh), she doesn't need to be stellar every time. That's it, I guess. A rather sudden-end for my review about a sudden-ended, apathetic, but ultimately captivating album.

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