S.I.D.E.S by Alice Merton
Pop musicians are, as Elvis Costello has pointed out while categorizing himself among their number, magpies: collectors, chatterers, bright mimics. They certainly borrow and imitate; with luck and skill, they add enough of themselves to give a new shine to old baubles.
S.I.D.E.S., the second full-length from modern-pop singer and songwriter Alice Merton, reflects how a peripatetic childhood—born in Germany and then resident in the U.S., Canada, and England—trained her not just to collect but also to discard.
Her magpie instincts aren’t perfectly honed: “Loveback” kicks everything off with the opera-dramatic dark energy of Editors and Florence + the Machine, and Merton’s voice doesn’t suffer much from comparison to Florence Welch’s, but the oddly pitch-shifted chants behind the song’s chorus land awkwardly.
In a similar way, “Hero” wastes some of Merton’s emotional intelligence within synth spikes and a robotically stiff rhythm that send the track down the kind of indie-quirk alley where Halsey spent too much of her early career.
On most of the 15 songs, though, Merton and her co-producers and mixers—including Tim Morten Uhlenbrock and Matty Green, the latter of whom has worked for Dua Lipa—keep the elements of their expression under firmly playful control.
“Everything” has the deceptively breezy summer-dress sway of Taylor Swift’s ballads of hearts recently broken, down to the carefully exhaled descending refrains; “Vertigo” has the urgently plastic catchiness of the aforementioned Lipa’s groovier spells; and “Blindside” marries tribalistic beats to a very light and dreamy chorus and a bassline that Parquet Courts would dig and maybe nick.
Quick mood-setting pieces like “Breathe In, Breathe Out” and “Shiny Things” shore up the album title’s idea of different, other, opposing and same sides. And “The Other Side,” which concludes the album with the clarity of eyes washed clean by tears. Alice Merton’s feelings don’t make her stupid, and magpies are among the smartest birds.
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