【搬运】【译】叉婊Pitchfork评Lorde 2017年专辑《Melodrama》（狂想曲）
搬运自：微信公众号【评论搬一堆】（在原文基础上添加了英语原文与排版调整）
翻译：Tyler Smith
校对：Ryan-Chopin
排版：Lynn Liu
Lorde captures emotions like none other. Her second album is a masterful study of being a young woman, a sleek and humid pop record full of grief and hedoniSm, crafted with the utmost care and wisdom.
Lorde捕捉感情的能力是独一无二的。她的第二张专辑对于一个年轻女孩来说绝对称得上是大师之作。在这张流畅而热情的专辑里，你可以同时感受到极致悲伤与享乐主义，每一首歌曲都倾注着作者的对世界的关怀与独到的智慧。
“Fluorescent”—has there ever been a better descriptor for first love? When Lorde sings it to the empty space beside her on “Supercut,” toward the end of her shining record Melodrama, we share a bit of her noted synesthesia: We see that bright, electrode glow of possibility, feel its siren shine on our faces. That neon is too beautiful to last, though; its buzz requires an effortful chemistry.
“荧光闪闪”这个词简直是对初恋的最佳描述。Lorde在专辑的结尾曲目“Supercut（精彩瞬间）”里在对着四下无人的旷野呐喊着这个词，这使我们真正地有了她通感的体验（据TeenVogue报道，Lorde患有一种罕见的神经系统疾病“联觉”，特定的音乐会刺激她眼前出现特定的颜色，这种通感极大程度的帮助了她的歌曲创作）。我们看到的是电极间激发出的鲜艳灯光，点亮了无限可能，我们可以感受到那夺目的光辉映在脸庞，只可惜这璀璨的霓虹转瞬即逝，只有与她产生默契，并努力维持这种化学反应，才能一直感受到这种奇异现象。
But when it is gone, the rest need not pale by comparison. The same could be said for one’s teenage years, which the 20-year-old Ella Yelich-O’Connor exits so graciously on this album. That formative era is a fraught time for girls, a dizzying span in which they’re most sought for beauty and cultural cachet yet their perspectives are forcefully minimized. Hear a song from a singer who taps their first euphorias, but know it’s merely real adults’ “fetishization.” Try to understand your ever-changing physiology, then have a porcine politician insist that it’s not yours to protect. And the growing pains feel endless; while it is horrible to be a teen girl who isn’t taken seriously by society, it’s even worse being a young woman unsure what to do with the autonomy that threatens it.
当这种奇异现象消失，余下的色彩依旧。这便如一个人的青春年华，而这张专辑就是Lorde给自己20岁的华丽谢幕之作。这个人生的拐角点对于一个女孩来说是忧虑重重的，同时这个时期令她们晕头转向，她们寻求真善美与文化认同，但她们的观点却遭到无情贬低；Lorde在歌中挥洒她们的极乐体验，但却被认作只是成年人严重的盲目迷恋；在努力弄清自己的生理机能时，便会有混蛋政治家说你不必操心这个问题。这样的成长之痛似乎从未停止。年轻女孩遭受社会的轻视是可怕的，但更可怕的是年轻女性有了自主权却迷失方向，无力向社会发起反抗。
Melodrama is Lorde’s study of being a young woman finding her own conviction in unsteady circumstances. Sometimes, this also involves being single—a breakup and a raucous house party serve as thematic through-lines—but romance is only part of the album’s script. In the difficult, exhilarating course of the record, written largely when Lorde was 18 and 19, her true reward comes with her embrace of self. As a nod to her clearest pop forbearer, her peace is in accepting that she will, sometimes, end up dancing on her own.
《Melodrama》是Lorde作为一个年轻女性在混乱的世界中寻找信念的作品。孤独是无可避免会被谈到的，因此，一次分手和一个嘈杂的派对成为了专辑的主线，但爱情并不是专辑的唯一主题。这张晦涩又令人兴奋大部分单曲创作于Lorde的18、19岁。她勇敢拥抱自己并取得收获：她极力克制使用流行元素，她内心的平和来自于她愿意在故事的结尾独舞。
Like her 2013 debut Pure Heroine, Melodrama is a work of sleek self-possession, packed with bursts of peculiar rhymes and production that confound expected song formulas. However, while Heroine cast off the trappings of materialiSm atop spacious trip-pop, Melodrama catches the mist off of New Wave rhythms that befit the name. (Bleachers’ Jack Antonoff, in his first production for Lorde, leaves a pliant and romantic thumbprint throughout; Heroine veteran Joel Little also returns.) Its first single and opening track, “Green Light,” casts a long shadow in its anthemic bliss. There’s a reason Max Martin called the New Zealander’s approach “incorrect songwriting”—by no Top 40 rubric should her song fire off, within its first 60 seconds, a spectral synthesizer wobble, a strident line of house piano, a subterranean vocal plunge, and an apropos-of-nothing gear shift that feels like storm clouds ebbing to the sun. Her lyrics, too, occupy an underexplored space; reams have been written about volatile breakups and last-call debauchery, but Lorde rages in a self-aware hedoniSm, reckless in grief yet knowing that tomorrow her heart will begin to heal. (“But I hear sounds in my mind/Brand new sounds in my mind,” she exults, after thoroughly mocking the bastard in falsetto sing-song.)
《Melodrama》延续了她在2013发行的专辑《Pure Heroine》一贯的沉着自如，大量别出心裁的韵律与制作，一改传统老套路。《Pure Heroine》摈弃了实用主义的种种限制，而《Melodrama》则名副其实地抓住的新潮流行旋律的导向（Bleachers的Jack Antonoff首次担任Lorde的制作人，经他之手，专辑遍布极富感染力的浪漫痕迹，《Pure Heroine》的参与者Joel Little也参与了这张专辑）。专辑的开场曲目“Green Light”在极乐颂歌的背后留下了长长的阴影。Max Martin称Lorde的方法为“不正确的创作”是有原因的——这首歌的前60秒不具备排名榜单前四十名歌曲的任何特征：幽灵般摇摆不定的电子音效伴随着刺耳的House乐段，人声低沉下去时曲调却意外地上扬，犹如浮云拨日。她的歌词亦是前无古人，变化无常的分手状态与纸醉金迷的骄奢生活已经被写烂了，但Lorde选择在极乐中发泄怒火，肆无忌惮地沉浸在悲伤中，又有着心伤能隔夜痊愈的自信。（她兴高采烈地用古怪的假声讥讽了她的混蛋前男友后，如此唱道：“我听见了一个崭新的声音从心底传来。”）
This breakup continues to provide fodder in her keening, Kate Bush falsetto warble on “Writer in the Dark” and the creaky, atonal electronic rasp of “Hard Feelings/Loveless.” When she sways alone in “Liability,” wondering if she’s too complicated to find love, it is heartrending and uncomfortably relatable. But the album is no saccharine journal entry by any means. Her party has pills, dresses rumpled on the floor, no absence of profanity, and a sense of humor, too: the moxie it takes to not only acknowledge your extravagant emotional contortions, but wink at them drolly by calling the whole thing a Melodrama.
一次分手为Lorde提供了源源不断的创作素材：Kate Bush式的假声吟唱，“Hard Feelings/Loveless.”中嘎吱作响的电气声和“Liability”中孤独摇摆的身影，思考着自己是否太过复杂以致找不到真爱。这些元素令人心碎的同时又让人联想起悲伤的过往。但这张专辑绝不是揉捏做作的流水账记录。她的派对里不乏滥用药物，衣衫散乱，脏话连天，却也不失幽默：她勇敢地承认自己情感的过度扭曲，但戏谑地将它们称作狂想曲。
Her percussive delivery, both in her Smoky lower register and lean falsetto, cuts sharpest in the bacchanalian bangers. “Sober” folds humid brass into a stutter that lightly recalls her Heroine hit “Royals,” along deft turns of phrase that suggest even in her imbibing, she’s too sharp to turn off self-scrutiny (“Midnight, lose my mind, I know you’re feeling it too/Can we keep up with the ruse?”). She’s a touch self-deprecating in the height of the party (“Homemade Dynamite”) and tenfold pensive as it wears down (“Perfect Places”). The record’s bittersweet trajectory feels not unlike Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Fever to Tell, intent on capturing both the carousing and the come-down in one breathless spree.
在这一系列狂欢颂歌中，Lorde沙哑的低音与尖锐假声和打击乐器的使用相得益彰。她在“Sober”里故意结巴的唱词处使用铜管乐，颇有一丝上张专辑的大热单曲“Royals”的遗风。句与句之间娴熟的转换说明了即使她喝得烂醉如泥，也仍然高度自省。（午夜/我失去心智/你知道你也有同感/我们能跟得上这些伎俩吗？）在派对达到高潮时，她开始了自我反省（“Homemade Dynamite”），在高潮过后，她倍感忧虑（“Perfect Places”）。这张专辑苦中带甜的悲剧就像Yeah Yeah Yeahs的专辑《Fever to tell》，即聚焦于狂欢，也不忘描绘狂欢中的落寞。
And the places Lorde goes on Melodrama really are special, particularly “The Louvre.” This track, in its gleaming synths and heartswell harmonies, captures an immersive bliss, a shared frequency of love just as irrepressibly grandiose as its sound. It’s the kind of connection that, even once it’s gone, lightens your bones forever. Whatever the next “Gossip Girl” is—whatever soapy serial next attempts to harness the teen zeitgeist with plush fabrics and sharp cheekbones—“The Louvre” will probably soundtrack its climactic moment. But as Lorde’s voice rises in it, awed in adoration as she whispers, “Well, summer slipped us underneath her tongue/Our days and nights are perfumed with obsession,” whatever’s onscreen can’t match her luminosity. It’s not enough to say Lorde is one in a generation. Really, it’s amazing this is the first time she was a teenager for how good she was at it.
狂想曲中，Lorde要去的地方不是别处，就是“The Louvre”（卢浮宫）”。在这首歌里大放异彩的电音以及令人心潮澎湃的和谐中，作者捕捉到一种让听众身临其境的愉悦、一种按捺不住的宏伟的爱的共振，这些感受一听就能体会到。这就是那种转瞬即逝却又能够刻在骨子里的奇妙联系。无论下一部《Gossip Girl》一样的现象级热播肥皂剧是什么样的，无论现在的电视剧如何以靓丽衣衫和精致容颜影响青年思潮，“The Louvre”将永远是作为高潮背景音乐的存在。当Lorde的声音缓缓扬起，出于爱慕呢喃道：“夏天悄悄地把我们藏在她舌头下，我们日日夜夜为情所乱”，荧幕上的电视剧永远不可能盖得过Lorde的寥寥数语的光辉，Lorde代表着一个时代，更令人惊奇的是她作品中对描写的拿捏让人怀疑她好像经历过不止一次青春期。
