Big Ideas

米LA出身、ジャンルを超えた独自の路線を築いてきたシンガー・ソングライター兼音楽プロデューサー、Remi Wolfが、待望のニュー・アルバム『Big Ideas』を完成。

After representing the U.S. for two years at the Youth Olympic Games as a skier, making a high-school run at American Idol, and then taking a different path to fame with a four-year stay at USCs Thorton School of Music, Remi Wolf landed on the pop scene with a highly stylized, neon-colored, D.I.Y.- influenced kitchen-sink clatter. She cracked the Billboard alternative airplay and digital songs charts in 2020 with the flexatone-featuring single "Hello Hello Hello" before making her full-length Island Records debut a year later with the extroverted, dizzyingly genre-inclusive Juno. That record was produced by Solomonophonic (Jared Solomon). After three years that included tours with Lorde, Paramore, and Olivia Rodrigo and sessions at Diamond Mine Recording and Electric Lady Studios in New York with Solomonophonic, Wolf returns with the like-minded Big Ideas. Its named for high-concept songs about subjects like love, lust, fantasy, reality, giddy highs, and lowly lows. Symbolic of those highs and lows while also engaging with the idea of being your own fairy godmother, the funky, 70s-suffused "Cinderella" opens the album with a deep groove, referee whistle, and horns, as Wolf slinks across the dancefloor to lyrics like "Baby girl, wont you dry your eyes/Dont stress, because youre doing it right." Parts reggae and angsty pop punk, "Wave" vents rather than uplifts, and songs like "Pitiful" and the art-punky "Kangaroo" are fizzy club-rock entries with crunchy as well as sparkling textures and song-specific vocal deliveries. Speaking of affected vocals, she employs Auto-Tune among other tricks on the emo-tinged "When I Thought of You," and "Just the Start" is a mostly unprocessed jokey folk song. Candid as ever throughout these twists and turns, the album arguably hits a climax of contrasts with the pairing of "Toro" and "Alone in Miami," two songs written with Ethan Gruska and Jack Demeo, one about having sex in a hotel room and the other about feeling alone in someones company. While Big Ideas could be accused of being uneven, filler is a matter of personal genre preference here, left turns that are fun or even funny dominate, and with a closer like the helium-voiced disco entry "Slay Bitch," any remaining scolds should be few and far between. ~ Marcy Donelson

ジャンルを跨ぐカラフルな万華鏡サウンドのデビュー作『Juno』から3年。米シンガー・ソングライターによる、よりファンキーでグルーヴィーになったセカンド・アルバム。サイケなトリップ感もたっぷりで、カーリー・レイ・ジェプセンらを手掛けるソロモノフォニックとの相性は引き続き絶好調。凸凹で暴走気味なところを含めてチャーミングで痛快。自己肯定感に溢れている。
bounce (C)村上ひさし