By Freya Hoare
A dingy, smoke-filled apartment in the middle of Soho, London in the 1970s. In an avocado green sitting room, you drop the needle down onto this new exciting, yet mellow album, Charm by an emerging artist Clairo.
Except… to shatter this imagery, you are not actually anywhere near your avocado green sitting room of the early 1970s… you are sat in a room in 2024 listening to Charm in its year of release, like I am right now. (Unless you actually are in an avocado green room. Which I respect).
Made popular by songs such as ‘Bags’ and ‘Amoeba’, Claire Cottrill, known professionally as Clairo, released her third album Charm in the July of 2024. The album is infused by a jazz band, yet relies heavily on both electronic and organic drums; the drummer more than likely reaching for the brushes rather than the notorious sticks. Few of the tracks, such as ‘Echo’, utilise the use of the synthesiser, but Clairo doesn’t rely on these solely as instruments, but this adds a nice textured layer that you don’t realise is there… but you would notice if someone took them away.
The main singles that were released in preparation for this album release were ‘Nomad’ and ‘Sexy to Someone’. However, another song further down the album became a TikTok favourite – ‘Juna’ – and in all honesty I can understand why. The song itself is easy to listen to, an earworm that then crawls into the outro lyrics “You know me, you know me”. It soon became one of those half effort picture slideshow TikTok trends where people either post their significant others or vague basic interests of theirs to make themselves sound interesting to the general public.
Cutting through the static of the main singles and that of TikTok trends, the album uses instruments that are organic and not computerised, although that doesn’t diminish the fact that synthesisers are still used. ‘Nomad’ opens the album and sets the tone like an evening at Ronnie Scott’s – the heft of a double bass that pairs wonderfully with soft sound of the brushes on the drums. ‘Nomad’ starts with the sound of a melancholic slide guitar and dainty violin, then the vocal arrive, the drums come in, and the previous slide guitar and violin cut out for minute to make space for a fair fingerpicking guitar riff during the pre-chorus, until all instruments come bounding into the chorus to uphold the main vocal track.
The main single and the second track on the album – ‘Sexy to Someone’ – has a very 1990s hip hop synthetic beat to it. This directly contradicts ‘Nomad’, with its double bass and lightly brushed drum track, as here, a flute and other soft instruments work with Clairo’s soft sounding voice. I’m going to be totally honest and say I have no idea what she is actually singing most of the time, but the music sounds nice and so does her voice, so as long as they aren’t like oil and water who am I to judge?
However, with every good album there are always several songs which are the epitome of nails on a chalk board. Rather like Coldplay’s entire discography. In the case of Charm it would have to be ‘Glory of the Snow’ which slots itself into the category of bad songs – just not a strong song at all – along with ‘Add Up my Love’ a few tracks earlier. The only thing giving that one a few points is that it sounds vaguely similar to another of Clairo’s songs – ‘Bags’ – which begs the question, should Clairo have left these two songs in the bag?
To close out the album, a tune titled ‘Pier 4’ is a sombre sounding melody that brings you back into reality of being in the present day and not in the analogy of your 1970s green smoke-filled sitting room after listening to Ella Fitzgerald and this album back-to-back. That only adds to the feeling of this song playing as old movie credits roll but once again, the dead wax is beginning to traipse into the speakers, the needle is begging to clock out for the evening and the smoke begins to fade away on this crackly plastic time travelling disk.
