Best known for My Delirium and Paris Is Burning, the two sulky synthpop singles she released in 2008, on this third album the New Zealand singer-songwriter Pip Brown ditches the brooding for a collection of pop that seems to take the early work of Katy Perry as its main point of reference. It’s that kind of grooveless, flatly bombastic and faintly retro subgenre-dodging pop-pop that even Perry herself has complicated in recent years. Brown may have hooks coming out of her ears – there is no weak link here in terms of infectious choruses, even if most sound uncannily familiar – but that only reinforces the strangely mechanical nature of this record. It feels like an echo chamber for the last five years of anodyne pop, and could have easily been created by a computer tasked with making generic 21st-century chart music. It adds up to a slick and competent, if uninspiring, production.
