By George Fenwick.
From the avant-garde cover art, Katy Perry's dramatic new haircut and all her talk of "purposeful pop," you could be forgiven for thinking this album might actually have been good, or at the very least interesting. But the most irritating thing about Witness, in context of Perry's roller coaster of a promotional rollout (livestream included), is that it is completely bland.
Perry has proven she can make great pop music - her 2010 album Teenage Dream excellently captured the ecstasy of adolescence, with the singer effortlessly playing multiple characters on an album that produced a plethora of hits. Witness, by contrast, is lifeless.
For a start, the album is cramped. There are 15 tracks, seemingly for no apparent reason other than that it might maximise Spotify streams. There's little variation in production style, and lyrically, it's a mess. Several tracks follow the dire trend in pop music of choosing a flat simile and using an entire song to thwack you over the head with it: On Roulette, a night out is like Russian Roulette; on Tsunami, sex is like swimming; on Bon Appetit, sex is like eating.
