Lorde album Melodrama a chance to appreciate the spirit of being young, silly and carefree

Vaughan Gunson, columnist for the Northern Advocate.

One of the cool things about music is that it allows you to generation hop. Thus it is with the wonderful new Lorde album Melodrama. It hasn't quite dropped me in Tardis-style to a North Shore house party, but listening to this album has got me as close as I'm likely to get.

So while I've no quirky dance moves of my own, I can still appreciate the spirit of being young, silly and carefree. Though that was never all there was to being young. I also recall being unsure of my place in the world. It's the mix of freedom and anxiety, of the future being both blissfully open and worryingly uncertain, that Lorde explores so intelligently here.

The album is a knowing celebration of what it is to be young in a world which seems so expansive, so international, and if you've got money in your pocket full of opportunities for fun. Lurking however, perhaps only a Facebook post away, is the potential for embarrassment and regret.

Throw into the mix, as Lorde does here, a breakup, then you've got serious material for melodrama. Lorde will provide the soundtrack to "all the glamour and the trauma", as she puts it on the title track.

This is what pop music has always revelled in. There's nothing new in the subject matter, what sets Lorde apart from some of her pop contemporaries is her artistry. The music is catchy, but not predictably so. The pop anthems teeter, soundscapes fray at the edges, rhythms take unexpected detours. And she uses her voice in a variety of ways, from low and slightly croaky to multi-tracked girl choir.

What sets Lorde apart from some of her pop contemporaries is her artistry.

What keeps me listening though are the lyrics, and the way Lorde phrases them for maximum effect. The passion of a new love is evoked with this stunning image: "Well, summer slipped us underneath her tongue/ Our days and nights are perfumed with obsession."

In Sober II (Melodrama) she sings "Oh, how fast the evening passes, cleaning up the champagne glasses." Bittersweet lines worthy of T.S. Elliot. Lorde may be a global superstar, but lines like this still speak to the rest of us.

As she did on Pure Heroine, Lorde is often deconstructing the hedonist life of partying, nightclubs and fleeting contacts with people who are traveling, for now, in the same car. In Homemade Dynamite the night takes a dark turn: "Might get your friend to drive, but he can hardly see/ We'll end up painted on the road, red and chrome, all the broken glass sparkling/ I guess we're partying."

As much as I'm enjoying this album, I know it's as an outsider, this isn't my life. And so these lines haunt me: "Uh, when you dream with a fever/ Bet you wish you could touch our rush." Ouch. This is young love as exclusion zone. We've got it, you haven't, don't you wish you still did? They don't write pop songs about decades long marriages.

Lorde is too intelligently self-aware, however, to believe that the rush will last. Pop songs themselves are brief, both in duration and their lasting ability to move us. I'm getting a thrill from listening to these songs, but I know I'll tire of them eventually and I'll be searching for my next hit of pop goodness.

Thanks Lorde for inviting us to your party. It was illuminating.

■ Vaughan Gunson is a writer and poet interested in social justice and big issues facing the planet.