Get the latest gossip
Kesha: . (Period) review – a smart, funny return to her hedonistic hot-mess persona
After a long legal battle, the pop star’s sixth album harks back to her 2010s era, with a buffet of pop styles and only rare hints of her highly-publicised trauma
While Rainbow and its immediate follow-ups regularly mined the legal disputes and resulting trauma for lyrical inspiration – a dramatic shift from the screw-you hedonism that powered her big hits in the early 2010s – Period signals a fresh start by, more or less, bringing back the Kesha who boasted about brushing her teeth with Jack Daniel’s and took to the stage accompanied by dancers dressed as giant penises. Yippee-Ki-Yay’s country-facing sound sits among a buffet of current pop styles: there’s synthy, 80s-leaning pop-rock you could imagine Taylor Swift singing on Delusional and Too Hard, and mid-tempo disco on Love Forever, while the spectre of hyperpop haunts the warp-speed Boy Crazy and Hudson Mohawke turns up glitchy Auto-Tune-heavy electro on Glow. That said, the songs are all really strong, filled with smart little twists and drops, and funny, self-referential lines: “You’re on TikTok / I’m the fucking OG.” You get the sense of the massed ranks of collaborators – including everyone from regular Father John Misty foil Jonathan Wilson to Madison Love, who counts Blackpink and Addison Rae among her songwriting clients – really getting behind her to make Period a success.
Or read this on The Guardian
