Day and Night, by Carl Rae Jepsen
Fourteen years after topping charts worldwide with the maddeningly catchy “Call Me Maybe,” Carly Rae Jepsen—now 40, married, and a mother—is in her finest, fittest artistic form.
She knows it, too: the Canadian singer and songwriter’s eighth long-player, Day and Night, features 24 songs split between two discs, the first diurnal (Day) and the second nocturnal (Night).
Jepsen and her many collaborators, including her producer husband Cole M.G.N. and “Call Me Maybe” co-writer Tavish Crowe, display confidence not only with the sheer number of songs but also with the abundance of pop elements they draw upon to keep those songs varied.
Each disc’s opening track establishes the mood division: “After All” starts Day with crisply isolated neo-soul piano, gospel voices bleeding through from next door, and an increasingly joyous lead vocal; “Never Let a Good Thing Die” starts Night fully entrenched in a bass-driven discotheque of desire before a coda that shimmers like afterglow.
Most of the reference points for the songs, such as the quirky electronic loops running through “Versailles” or the gauze-thin keyboard line of “Habits of Creatures,” are familiar to consumers of 21st-century pop.
Outliers appear steadily, however: “On Wires” starts with an echo of Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets,” while the gently muffled pastel synths and computerized rhythms of “Patience Passion Power” sound remotely but undeniably related to Alternative TV’s punchy 1978 post-punk single “Action Time Vision.”
Jepsen’s most consistent reference point as a singer ought to be Kylie Minogue, another pop tart who started chirpy, then developed greater stylistic and vocal range. She isn’t showy, but she isn’t shallow, either.
In a year of female-forward pop music highlighted by career-reaffirming albums from Madonna, Robyn, and Charli XCX (two albums, in her case), Carly Rae Jepsen’s Day and Night might be the biggest, boldest pop party of them all.
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