【译】叉婊Pitchfork评Lorde 2021年专辑《Solar Power》

翻译：Nomanlandever

Lorde returns with a self-aware, scaled-back album. Its holistic beauty and revelations about the natural world are often lost in the drab music.

Lorde带着一张自我意识，返璞归真的专辑回归乐坛。专辑的整体美和对自然世界的揭示常常迷失在单调的音乐中。

You have to act so dumb to be happy, nowadays. You can’t read the news and you can’t check social media; don’t look at the death toll, don’t look at the wildfire, don’t look at the weather. How do you separate yourself from the world without succumbing to denial? Maybe you could go away for a while—take some time to recharge. New Zealand sounds nice. I think the air is cleaner.

当今，你似乎只有装聋作哑才能得到快乐。不能看新闻，不能打开社交媒体；不看死亡人数，不看火灾，不看天气。如何才能在不自我麻痹的条件下与世界脱轨呢？也许你可以闭关一段时间——给自己充充电。新西兰听起来不错。我认为那儿的空气更干净。

Lorde is there, and she’s chilling. After she wrapped the world tour for her second album, 2017’s Melodrama, she went home to Auckland and was hardly seen in public. She undertook a tech detox, giving up social media and setting her phone screen to grayscale, to make it less enticing. When she wanted to gain perspective on the climate crisis, she traveled to Antarctica. She made Solar Power, a self-aware, scaled-back album that asks you to “breathe out and tune in,” like a strange little paperbound spiritual text at a hippie bookshop. It’s part newfound realization of social and environmental consciousness, part self-help guide: her rationale for choosing the quiet life and reconnecting with nature, a diagram for threading the needle of joy when you might also live to see the end of Earth. Her message is—literally—light.

Lorde在那儿，寒风刺骨。在她结束第二张专辑《Melodrama》的世界巡演后，她回到奥克兰的家，便很少在公众场合露面。她戒了科技瘾，抛弃社交媒体，把手机屏幕调成灰色，让它不那么诱人。当她想进一步探究气候危机时，她前往南极洲旅行。她做出《Solar Power》，一张自我意识，返璞归真的专辑，让你“边呼气边听专辑”，就像嬉皮书店里的一本奇怪的简装精神读物。这本书一部分是对社会和环境意识的新认识，一部分是自助指南：她选择宁静生活并重新接触自然的原因，是当你可能还活到地球末日之时，还可以通过图表穿针引线出快乐。她传递出的信息——无疑是——光明的。

Once, a Lorde album was a monument years in the making, but here she asks us to be satisfied with everyday beauty, unassuming arrangements of guitar, keys, percussion, and voice. Produced once again with the ubiquitous Jack Antonoff, Solar Power sounds more interesting when it bottles the jasmine air of Laurel Canyon folk, less interesting when it emulates that sound’s descendants in early-2000s soft rock (Sheryl Crow, Jewel) without any of the hooks or energy of radio pop. These songs don’t move like the songs on Melodrama: no startling change-ups, no fireworks, just a spoken interlude by Robyn and a few distracting foley effects. On the title track and on the closer, Lorde communes directly with nature, and in between, she smuggles in love songs, dreams, doubts, a memorial for her late dog, Pearl, and, for the first time, close vocal harmonies with other singers, including Clairo and Phoebe Bridgers. It is the first Lorde album that doesn’t try to tug on your sleeve, or stare directly into your eyes. It feels like doing less.

曾经，Lorde的专辑象征着时代的里程碑。但如今，Lorde通过低调的吉他、琴键、打击乐器和声音的编曲，让我们乐观对待美丽的生活。又一次由无处不在的Jack Antonoff制作，《Solar Power》当装进月桂峡谷(Laurel Canyon)民谣的茉莉花空气时，听上去更为有趣，当它没有任何hook和电台流行音乐的味道，而是模仿21世纪初软摇滚(Sheryl Crow, Jewel)的音乐时，就不那么有趣了。这些歌曲不像Melodrama上的歌曲那样动人：没有令人惊喜的变化，没有燃点，只有一段Robyn朗读的插曲和一些令人分心的愚蠢音效。在专辑同名曲和收尾曲中，Lorde直接与自然亲密交流，在专辑中段，她偷偷夹杂了情歌、梦想、怀疑、悼念她已故的狗Pearl，等元素，并首次与包括Clario和Phoebe Bridgers在内的其他歌手和声。这是Lorde的第一张没有试图拉你的袖子，或直勾勾盯着你眼睛的专辑。感觉更为简洁。

Lorde didn’t log off entirely; people who live under rocks aren’t nearly so well-versed in Antonoff discourse. Did you see her putting away Hot Ones like they’re chicken nuggets? She’s been reading about the Sacklers (“Born in the year of OxyContin”) and watching Tarantino (“Once upon a time in Hollywood…”). She’s subscribing to trendy newsletters and checking her finsta, which maybe helps explain the album’s bent towards Y2K vibes and wellness fads. Solar Power is a little bit out-of-time, but now and then it taps into the kind of paralyzing quarter-life celebrity crisis found recently on albums by Billie Eilish and Clairo. “Teen millionaire having nightmares from the camera flash,” Lorde says on opener “The Path,” explaining what she’s escaped. She begins the gorgeous “California” with Carole King announcing her Grammy win for her hit single “Royals” in 2014 and writes a breakup song personifying Los Angeles as a “golden body” with a “cool hand around my neck.” She’s grateful to be away from it all, until she isn’t, and on the next song, “Stoned at the Nail Salon,” she wonders what might happen if she changed her mind and reclaimed her place among the glitterati.

Lorde也没有完全退网；山顶洞人是不可能了解Jack Antonoff近期的事情的。你有见到她彻底忽略热点话题，把它们当成鸡块一样。她一直在读萨克勒夫妇(《生于奥施康定之年》)的故事，也在看 Tarantino(《好莱坞往事》)。她订阅着潮流通讯，查看自己的finsta，这或许有助于解释为何这张专辑倾向Y2K和健康时尚文化。尽管《Solar Power》有点过时，但时不时地会像最近Billie Eilish和Clairo的新专辑一样探讨名人的青年危机。“Teen millionaire having nightmares from the camera flash,” Lorde在《The Path》中唱道，解释了为什么她选择逃离的原因。华丽歌曲《California》开头，Lorde讲述着Carole King在2014年格莱美给她的热单《Royals》颁奖的故事，且写下一首分手歌曲，将洛杉矶化身为“金色的身体”，“一只冰冷的手搂在我的脖子上”。她很感激能远离这一切。在下一首歌《Stoned at the Nail Salon》中她想知道，如果她改变主意，重新在上流社会占据一席之地，会发生什么。

More than ever, Lorde’s writing is the best part of her music, if only because the music is a little disappointing. “You felled me clean as a pine,” she sings to her lover on “The Man With the Axe,” and describes the dark concavity of a concert arena that’s shiny as a manicure and transient as the tide: “Fingernail worlds, like favorite seashells/They fill up my nights and then they float away.”The words are elegant, compact, enormous, rich in a kind of organic imagery that distinguishes Solar Power from Lorde’s past work. But while Melodrama purportedly unfolded within the confines of a house party, the concept came so naturally you didn’t have to think about it; it just felt like you were there. Solar Power tries to be bigger and smaller at the same time, spanning scenes of domestic bliss and apocalyptic flight without the conceptual architecture to unite them.

Lorde在专辑的歌词写作前所未有的是专辑中最棒的部分，如果只是因为音乐有点令人失望的话。 “You felled me clean as a pine,” 她在《The Man With the Axe》中对着情人唱道，描绘出体育馆演唱会灯光暗处与指甲油一样闪亮且与潮水一样转瞬即逝的场面：“Fingernail worlds, like favorite seashells/They fill up my nights and then they float away.” 文字优雅，紧凑，宏大，富有有机意象，这是《Solar Power》与Lorde旧作的最大区别。但《Melodrama》据称是在一个家庭聚会的范围内展开的，这个概念舒展的如此自然，以至于你不用去动脑想象，如同身临其境。《Solar Power》既想做大也想做小，跨越家庭幸福和世界末日航班的场景，但概念不能将它们结合起来。

Trying for everything makes it all sound a little incoherent. On “Dominoes,” we watch an abuser skate free by reinventing himself as a new-age guy. There’s a kernel of a great idea in the way Lorde taps her voice across the syllables of the chorus, but the slack, demo-style recording won’t let it develop; city sirens ring in the distance as Antonoff’s guitar playing transports us to the grooviest coffeehouse on the beach. Three songs later, on “Mood Ring,” Lorde steps into a phony woo-woo persona herself, as if she too can buy the cure at a crystal shop. “Mood Ring,” as the artist was immediately at pains to say, is a satire of contemporary emotional detachment, a joke about a phone with a color screen—yet it’s too sweet to be biting, not sufficiently exaggerated to be funny, certainly not funny enough to pull off the squiggle of synth that enters beneath the line, “Let’s fly somewhere Eastern.” The shallowness comes to a head on “Secrets From a Girl (Who’s Seen It All),” where the secret wisdom is occasionally heartbreaking (“’Member what you thought was grief before you got the call?”) and more often platitudinal (“You gotta want it for yourself”).

什么都尝试的做法会让专辑变得有些不连贯。在《Dominoes》中，我们看到一个药物滥用者通过将自己改造成一个新时代的人而逃脱惩罚。Lorde用她的声音轻敲副歌的音节，这个想法的本身很棒，但松散Demo式录音扼杀了更多的潜质。城市的警笛声在远处响起，Jack Antonoff的吉他演奏把我们带到海滩上最时髦的咖啡馆。三首歌后，在《Mood Ring》中，Lorde变为一个虚伪迷信的人，好似她能在水晶商店中购买到治愈良方。《Mood Ring》”这位艺术家立即痛苦地说，是一首讽刺当代情感冷淡，一个关于彩屏手机的笑话——但似乎过于甜蜜，不够辛辣，也不适合夸张的搞笑，在歌曲推进到歌词“Let’s fly somewhere Eastern.” 时，确实显得有些无聊。这种肤浅在《Secrets From a Girl (Who’s Seen It All)》中达到顶点，歌曲中的秘密智慧偶尔令人动情(“’Member what you thought was grief before you got the call?”)，更多的时候则是陈词滥调 (“You gotta want it for yourself”).

It’s worth making art that promises a way out, art that can approach climate anxiety with clear eyes and purpose instead of dissonance and dread. But most of Solar Power doesn’t solicit strong emotion in either direction. Shouldn’t an album about climate grief and puppy grief and social grief by one of the best pop songwriters of her generation make you feel something? The music cycles through chipper acoustic chords, mournful six-string lines, and drummer Matt Chamberlain’s effortless shuffle, never locking into the bittersweet angst of Natalie Imbruglia, the cerebral intricacy of Jewel, the mutual conviction of a TLC ballad. It’s soft and loose and textureless. The sharpest pain comes in a moan at the end of “Fallen Fruit,” one of two incantatory interludes inspired, if we can call it that, by pending environmental collapse: “How can I love what I know I am gonna lose?/Don’t make me choose.”

制作一张确保有始有终的专辑，一张能清晰理智看待气候问题的焦虑情绪，而不是情绪失控和恐惧的心态看待。但《Solar Power》里的多数歌曲都不会带有过于强烈的情绪。由Lorde，同时代最优秀的流行歌曲作家之一，创作的关于气候变化悲痛、宠物辞世悲痛和社会问题悲痛的专辑难道不应该让你有所感触吗？专辑充盈着活泼的原声和弦，悲伤的六弦线，和鼓手Matt Chamberlain轻易做出的慢切分节奏，专辑没有陷入Natalie Imbruglia式苦乐参半的焦虑，Jewel式错综复杂的思考，TLC抒情曲的共同信念，而是柔软、松散、没有纹理感的。专辑最痛楚之处出现在《Fallen Fruit》结尾处的一处呻吟，两段咒语般的插曲之一，灵感，如果我们可以这样说，来自即将到来的生态崩溃“How can I love what I know I am gonna lose? /Don’t make me choose.” 

“Fallen Fruit” and its sister “Leader of a New Regime” are weird songs, but Solar Power leaves so much room to be weirder, wilder, more joyful. I’m thinking of something Lorde said to the newsletter Blackbird Spyplane about why she went to Antarctica and what she learned there: “To go someplace where all you’re thinking about all day is the climate and environment was clarifying, and also kind of mystifying.” Clarifying and mystifying: Is there any other way to feel in the thrall of our only planet? But there’s just one moment on Solar Power that does. It’s at the very end, “Oceanic Feeling,” after Lorde rambles around for a while, visiting a favorite ocean bluff, reflecting on the lives of her family members and future daughter, on her past self. The beat drops away, the music falls to a murmur, and in a fluttering voice, she calls up a beachside bonfire and ponders metaphoric self-immolation. The implication is that Lorde does not want to do this, not like this, forever; that true happiness will always be out there in front of you, the deep blue shadow over the water.

《Fallen Fruit》和姐妹歌曲《Leader of a New Regime》是两首古怪的歌，但《Solar Power》留下的空白想象空间更奇怪、更狂野、更快乐。我在回想Lorde在Blackbird Spyplane采访中的话语，内容是她为什么去南极洲，以及在那里学到了什么：“去一个你整天只想着气候和环境的地方，既更能理清问题，又带有点神秘气息。”净化与神秘：束缚在我们唯一的家园地球上还能有其他方式来感受吗？但《Solar Power》出现的一瞬间确实能感受到，在专辑很末尾处的《Oceanic Feeling》中，Lorde随处漫步了一段时间后，去到了她最喜欢的海边悬崖，思考了她的家人和未来女儿的生活，回忆了过去的自己。节拍渐渐消失，音乐变为呢喃低语，她用颤抖的声音召唤起一堆海滨篝火，思考着自我牺牲的隐喻。言下之意是Lorde不想这样做，不想永远做这样的选择；真正的幸福永远在你面前，就像水面上深蓝色的阴影。