The power ballad marks the collapse of drama into the arms of melodrama. If camp is the failure of seriousness, then the power ballad is the opposite, its success. There is no paradox in the fact that many power ballads are indelibly camp – that’s thanks to the way we British receive them, always slightly uncomfortable with the revelation of genuine emotion, always looking for the easy exit of the first available gag. But you can’t make a great power ballad if you try to wink at the audience through the drifts of dry ice. It’s why no one listens to the Darkness any more, and why Total Eclipse of the Heart will live forever.
American singer-songwriter Laura “LP” Pergolizzi understands these things instinctively, and tries to prove it with this album of iceberg-paced ballads that whiff of wind machines and backlit mullets. She has a decent enough voice, like Stevie Nicks without any of the sylvan wildness or grit. But the music is horrible. You end up regarding its strident insincerity with a sort of awed horror. It’s late-period Celine Dion, going mad in her Vegas penthouse; it’s Ant and Dec remaking Triumph of the Will.
