How marriage helped Rita get her aura back: ADRIAN THRILLS reviews

How marriage helped Rita get her aura back: ADRIAN THRILLS reviews You & I

RITA ORA: You&I (BMG) 

Verdict: Pop bangers and ballads 

Rating:

TAYLOR SWIFT: Speak Now (Taylor’s Version; Universal)

Verdict: Affectionate restoration

Rating:

Since releasing her debut album in 2012, Rita Ora hasn’t swamped the pop world with new music. She’s kept herself in the public eye as an effervescent presence on The Voice, The X Factor and The Masked Singer.

She’s also taken on film roles. But singles and EPs aside, her recorded output in the past 11 years has consisted of one studio album: 2018’s Phoenix.

In the same period, Taylor Swift has made ten albums (including three re-recordings) and Lana Del Rey seven.

It’s not as if Rita has been prolific on the live front, either. Her 2019 tour was engaging, but it’s the only time she’s ventured into the UK’s biggest arenas.

All of which gives her something to prove on her third album — and she steps up to the plate in style.

With the 32-year-old now more involved in composition and production (she co-wrote every track), You & I is an addictive collection of pop bangers and revealing ballads that places the singer front and centre for the first time in an uneven career. It’s certainly an improvement on Phoenix, which saw her overshadowed by collaborators including Avicii, Liam Payne and Cardi B.

ADRIAN THRILLS: Since releasing her debut album in 2012, Rita Ora hasn’t swamped the pop world with new music

ADRIAN THRILLS: You & I is an addictive collection of pop bangers and revealing ballads that places the singer front and centre for the first time in an uneven career

ADRIAN THRILLS: Ora married Oscar-winning film director Taika Waititi, and the first half of You & I charts phases of their relationship against a backdrop of house, garage and disco

She’s now working with R&B producer Oak Felder and the banishment of big-name guests makes this a far more rounded record. Last year, Ora married Oscar-winning film director Taika Waititi, and the first half of You & I charts phases of their relationship against a backdrop of house, garage and disco. Don’t Think Twice revels in the thrill of new love and You Only Love Me incorporates affectionate voice notes from Waititi. On Praising You, Rita re-works Fatboy Slim’s 1998 hit Praise You as an ode to marital bliss, while the 1980s-style title track, a bleary-eyed synth ballad written the morning after her nuptials, namechecks a series of classic love songs: among the tracks on her wedding playlist are Sweet Caroline, Eternal Flame and I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me).

Despite the loved-up references, the most intimate moments arrive later as Ora gets up close and personal. Born to Albanian parents in what is now Kosovo, she fled the country’s war-torn capital, Pristina, as a refugee in 1991.

The family ended up in Notting Hill, and the most revealing tracks look back fondly on her London upbringing. The bittersweet Shape Of Me, all Spaghetti Western drums and 1960s country stylings, is a beautifully-sung account of how her outlook reflects her mother’s survival instincts (‘Don’t you worry, babe, you’ve got my blood in your veins’).

There’s also tenderness and emotional punch in closing ballads Notting Hill and I Don’t Wanna Be Your Friend. Ora has always had a powerful voice. On You & I, she’s finally making the most of it, exploring a range of moods without losing sight of the pop essentials . . . lovely, Rita.

ADRIAN THRILLS: As her fans crash the Ticketmaster website in the scramble to secure tickets for next summer’s Eras tour, Taylor Swift continues to revamp her early albums

ADRIAN THRILLS: Given how sharply she articulated youthful angst in 2010, it’s disheartening that she has re-written a line in Better Than Revenge, a feisty and funny take-down of an unnamed love rival who had the audacity to steal her boyfriend

ADRIAN THRILLS: Speak Now was the first album Taylor penned alone, and it rubber-stamped her arrival as a candid storyteller who could chronicle the hopes and fears of her young audience

As her fans crash the Ticketmaster website in the scramble to secure tickets for next summer’s Eras tour, Taylor Swift continues to revamp her early albums. Two years ago, she revisited 2008’s Fearless (her last country album) and 2012’s Red (her first proper pop one). She’s now alighting on 2010’s Speak Now, a transitional release with a foot in both camps.

The re-recordings were prompted by the sale of her master tapes — and the rights to her early catalogue — to music mogul Scooter Braun, and it’s hard to fault her determination to regain ownership. From a commercial perspective, the move has been an unqualified success. Artistically, the first hints of diminishing returns are starting to emerge. As with the facelifts given to Fearless and Red, Swift sticks faithfully to the original arrangements.

She was aged between 18 and 20 when she recorded her third LP, and her voice has become richer since then. The musical changes are subtle. The electric guitars now sound fuller, and there’s more of a cutting edge to country-rocker The Story Of Us.

But the album’s underlying appeal is essentially the same. Speak Now was the first album Taylor penned alone, and it rubber-stamped her arrival as a candid storyteller who could chronicle the hopes and fears of her young audience.

‘You made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter,’ she confesses on Mine, one of several radio-friendly tales of late-teen romance and heartache.

In the grand Nashville tradition, she isn’t afraid to be corny, either: ‘It turns out freedom ain’t nothing but missing you,’ she laments on Back To December. It’s easy to imagine Tammy Wynette singing the same line.

Given how sharply she articulated youthful angst in 2010, it’s disheartening that she has re-written a line in Better Than Revenge, a feisty and funny take-down of an unnamed love rival who had the audacity to steal her boyfriend.

‘She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress,’ she scoffed in the unsisterly original. ‘He was a moth to the flame, she was holding the matches,’ run her new words in a concession to our more sensitive times. Trouble is, the song now lacks the biting teenage wit it once had.

That aside, this restoration is notable for the six ‘new’ songs that failed to make the original cut. Two of them, Electric Touch and Castles Crumbling, feature emo-rockers Fall Out Boy and Hayley Williams, but the best — the Police-like I Can See You and romantic fantasy Timeless — are first-rate additions to her burgeoning catalogue.

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