allystoybarn

Ke$ha is probably one of the more controversial figures to regularly appear on the top 40, certainly her music is polarising. Pretty much everyone has an opinion.

To be perfectly clear, right from the off, I like Ke$ha up to a point. I've seen her in concert, and while I have little to no regard for her fans I find her music fun and definitely fun to dance to, though I also quite often find her to be toeing the line of obnoxious. I don't completely enjoy all her songs, but the ones I do I enjoy to the absolute maximum.

So, I was curious to see where her new album would go. If it would expand her repertoire or just keep on the same track of highly polished, if a little undesirable pop songs.

I wasn't expecting much of Warrior, to be entirely honest (as I said before I don't like all of Ke$ha's songs) and I'm glad of this because with the release of the first single Die Young, I was largely let down. Listen to it, it's basically a Flo Rida song with different lyrics and was ultimately only okay. And that's all I can say of the whole album, even the songs added for the Deluxe edition only tip the album into the pretty listen-able category.

The songs are not bad. I repeat, if you like vacuous pop music, this is your album because, save for a couple of tracks which I'll talk about later, it keeps pretty much the same pace throughout the whole album. It's nothing special.

And this disappoints me.

Warrior offers nothing new, and it's ultimately a totally pointless release because anything you want from this album, you already got from Animal/Cannibal. You can practically pair songs from both albums up, there's little distinction, and I genuinely think that Animal/Cannibal was much more interesting. It's not bad, it's just... nothing new.

However, those songs that I said were exceptions. Dirty Love (featuring Iggy Pop) is an exercise in something a little bit new, it stretches Ke$ha's repertoire slightly - even if it is still as obnoxious as ever - and I don't really like Iggy Pop's voice but they play off each other very well.

The other song that really stands out is Love Into The Light. One thing that Ke$ha is known for is her utterly unapologetic swearing and drinking attitude and you could never claim that she has much in the way of emotional commitment in most of her songs. She showed glimpses of genuine emotional acuity in the Cannibal part of her album with The Harold Song, and Love Into The Light has the same kind of tone. In it Ke$ha does the typical acknowledgement of her boozing and partying but this isn't the same obnoxious 'if you don't like it, suck it' tone that she usually employs. Instead it's "I'm sorry, but I am just not sorry" and it's softer and much less abrasive.

Basically, I feel like I can like her in that song, but the rest of the album falls flat as much of the same.