Album Of The Week: Charli XCX True Romance

The British singer Charli XCX emerged from the internet ether about a year and a half ago, around the same time most of us noticed Grimes, and she seemed cut from the same cloth. In her videos, she looked like a futuristic platform-booted goth-rave cyborg -- a sort of living mall-pop signifier and a living comment on mall-pop signifers at the same damn time. But she's been steadily cranking out singles ever since then, and now that she's finally gotten around to putting together her debut album True Romance (an album half-made up of all those internet singles), it's finally evident that she's really just a pop singer, in the time-honored sense, with a goofily anime-indebted sci-fi fashion sense. On True Romance, she sneers and cusses like 2006 Lily Allen, and throws gum-snap tough talk over next-level club music like 2008 Santogold, and breathily floats over breezy keyboards like 2012 Solange. She sings songs about how she's really into you, boy, or about how you fucked up when you walked out on her, like all three of those girls and a million other girls and boys. And True Romance succeeds because they're almost all really good songs. The album doesn't break molds; it shows how life-affirmingly great those molds can be.