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Kesha’s Warrior

Keshas+Warrior
Ke$ha attends the Washington DC Jingle Ball concert at the Patriot Center in Fairfax, Virginia (Courtesy of MCT Campus)

Kesha is at it again, (or Ke$ha if you are a pop faithful).

 
That is, her newest album, “Warrior,” has recently been dropped to the coos of teenage girls and trash-pop fans everywhere.

 
And this album is her trashiest.
Kesha is a bit of an enigma: she doesn’t write songs with pop-hooks based on anything that has been done before. She has eclectic influences and a wide array of musical timbres.
Still, most of her music treads on the generic, trashy vein of pop music.

 
“Warrior,” in all accounts is a good album. From the first single, “Die Young,” with its trashy, hippie rock bravado, Kesha delivers a beautifully varied song structure.

 
Taking cues from her indie contemporaries, she works with fun.’s Nate Ruess on crafting catchy melodies and clear cut vocal harmonies.

 
From “Die Young,” to “Love into the Light,” the final song on the LP, Kesha delivers a hooky, catchy but over-all varied production, rife with missteps and triumphs.

 
The biggest issue with Kesha is not her unwillingness to learn from her mistakes or her unwillingness to bend to typical singer-songwriter status. Instead, her problem is simple: her influences are too varied and too different to truly come together coherently into one sound.
So when she crafts each album, she has no real coherent structure or sound in mind. She avoids labeling her sound, which opens her up to a lot of criticism and consequences.

 
But “Warrior” is much closer to her intended goal than her previous releases: a trashy pop circus that delivers in both songwriting chops and in emotional, visceral vocal braggadocio.

 

 
But if there is one lesson Kesha needs to learn moving forward to be a truly great performer and a legendary musician, it’s that hip catchphrases and trendy, glitter strewn music videos are not enough to truly transcend her musical eccentricities.

 
No.

 
Kesha needs to avoid becoming another music industry cliché by being more subtle with her music and persona and, to put it simply, to write an album that is both catchy and truly clever and original.

 
“Warrior” is not that album.

 
But it’s pretty close.

3.5 Out Of 5 Stars
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Joe Cristo, Author

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