Like Ellie Goulding, Norwegian singer-songwriter Aurora Aksnes is a John Lewis artist, having lent her ethereal voice to the department store’s Christmas TV ad last year. Also like Goulding, Aurora makes coldly bombastic pop, but she is more given to angsty melodrama. Her debut’s dominant theme is that of violent submission, with Aurora variously looking for somebody to “conquer” her, kissing the ground beneath a love interest’s feet and being shot in the head by a man as a pre-emptive strike against life’s hardships. These sentiments would probably sound disturbing – especially coming from a 19-year-old – if they weren’t couched in such sonic primness. Aurora’s voice has a childlike purity, and while the intermittently minimalist production sounds vaguely voguish in a trip-hop kind of way, that sparseness often gives the songs a slightly anodyne quality. It makes for a record whose potential power feels dampened, if not neutralised altogether.
