Your opinion on her debut album will largely be dictated on your memories of the era; trailed by the single "Paris is Burning" with it’s robot tooled, Numan-esque verses and a huge, resistance pulverizing chorus lifted from middling brit-trio Bananarama, it’s an exercise that has absolutely no shame and in terms of glitzy execution has few recent peers either. Along with its 12 sidekicks, the collective constitutes quite simply the kind of thing Katy Perry would trade in her corsets for and by extension ultimately proves to be the best mainstream pop record of 2008.
Close your eyes and the whole thing sounds like a seamless hour of power courtesy of VH-1. Opener "Magic" clunks boxily like Roxette in a Cote D’azur nightclub, Brown coaxing a long distance lover to relocate pronto with the line “One life here with me and it’s magic” as a thousand U-Hauls warm up in the background. It may be populist, but it's far from brainless. The titular anti-heroine of "Manipulating Woman" could quite easily be a metaphor for Ladyhawke herself. Battling the dichotomous forces of high concept Hollywood, Brown sings back at the icy maneater in the mirror backed by a jagged, choppy rock-lite backing which recalls Pat Benatar and a thousand soft focus close ups.
So far, so nostalgic. But it’s on "My Delirium" that the elfin singer nails it, heading for the dancefloor and deploying a cheerleader chant-hook so big you'll need a Camaro to escape and sending those of a certain age into shambling diatribes about how The Go-Go's descent into drug fuelled anarchy was the greatest loss to rock and roll since Lennon died.
Of course the ensemble wouldn’t be complete without a paean to mid-era Fleetwood Mac, but "Love Don’t Live Here" succeeds where many others have failed. Whether truly authentic or not, Brown captures the real secret gift within Tango In The Night's genius; the pristinely crisp quality of Lindsay Buckingham's songwriting. "Back In The Van" sounds like a Cyndi Lauper song, but Brown chooses rightly to ignore her grating, toddler esque tone. And yet even more, there are hits everywhere, littered like shells on a beach. "Dusk 'Til Dawn" again deploys Bananarama harmonies and should probably carry a sanity warning, snaking into the listener's brain until it there's only an empty cranium left. The shimmering "Crazyworld" is the sort of thing Pink discarded for the underwhelming angst of street cred long ago.
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