Over the last few months Paloma Faith has been talking up her fourth album, The Architect. There were self-perpetuated rumours of her rockin’ out, going off at a completely fresh musical angle, with lyrical content that sidestepped pop's usual concerns in favour of tackling societal issues and the state of things in our fucked-up world. Sounded good. However, a couple of clips of chatting about our duty to the welfare state and such, one featuring the writer Owen Jones, does not a political album make. In fact The Architect is business as usual, a continuation of the last album and not really very different from it at all.
Since she first appeared eight years ago, Paloma Faith has been the freaky-deaky theatrical alternative for girl-pop lovers, neither as raw as Adele or as plastic (and sex-obsessed) as Rihanna. She’s a very British sort of pop star, a colourful eccentric, deeply dipped in art and cabaret traditions, also inclined towards old-fashioned pre-rock’n’roll ideals of popular music. The Architect is lathered in orchestral bombast, assisted by David Arnold, with other contributors including ultra-mainstream super-producers/songwriters such as Sia, Starsmith and Jesse Shatkin. Apart from opening with a Samuel L Jackson monologue, the album’s first half is, then, rather predictable, with Seventies-LA-Motown opulence on cuts such “I’ll Be Gentle” and “Crybaby” (the former featuring John Legend), and Amy Winhouse-meets-Shirley Bassey epics like “Guilty”, alongside the giganto-pop monster “Warrior”.
However, during the album’s second half Faith hits a gold run of tunes, notably the funkin’ furious – and possibly even loosely political! – “WW3”, the chugging and vast “Still Around”, and the beatsy, solid Memphis-style soul-pop of “Lost and Lonely”. The Architect, then, is not exactly a departure from anything Paloma Faith has done in the past, which is a shame as she clearly has the creative potential to push boundaries, but for those who already count themselves as fans, there’s enough to here please.
Overleaf: watch the video for "Crybaby" by Paloma Faith