Fair enough, it may be tongue in cheek, but it really doesn’t justify the kind of french-kissing enjoyed by the needlessly self-prolific ram-jam rap intro that comes courtesy of ‘Curriculum Vitae’. Perhaps it’s just Swedish humour, I don’t know, but whilst it caricatures the customary rap arrival, the hype and the usual fanfare – it just doesn’t really serve a point. First we have a black man barking at us to ‘turn it the fuck up’ and then he just carries on. With careful editing it may have had impact – but like elsewhere on the album, someone somewhere just didn’t know when to stop. Can’t have too much of a good thing? Well I beg to differ. And besides it’s not all good. When someone usually says ‘you can’t have too much of a good thing’ they tend to mean they’re prepared to dispense shitloads of additional baggage with the half-dozen or so excellent tracks they’re travelling with. A good album (if I may be so bold) is a little like packing for a holiday: pack too little and you’ve ruined your holiday, pack too much and the plane you’re in may be forced to land. It’s not quality control but baggage control – and the baggage retrieval system they have at Heathrow must be nothing compared to that at Konichiwa Records. And herein lies the rub: Konichiwa Records is run by Robyn, staffed by Robyn, trading Robyn and very nearly brought down by Robyn.
Disillusioned by the lack of artistic control offered by her former labels BMG and Jive, Robyn founded Konichiwa Records. It’s a convoluted history. Discovered at 13, signed at 16 to RCA Records, scoring no end of hits in her native Sweden as well as the US, Robyn is a bit of a girl wonder, becoming an ambassador to UNICEF on the one hand and doing loads of crazy shit on films like Fucking Åmål on the other. And now she’s back with an album that features collaborations with Klas Åhlund from Teddybears STHLM, Swedish duo The Knife and former Cheiron producer Alexander Kronlund. And for the most part it’s fairly stunning. It’s slightly contrived, fair enough and it covets as many disparate styles and voices as an entire series of ‘Stars In Their Eyes’ – but if this is Karaoke, it’s Karaoke of the highest order. A cartoon manga Peaches rumbles and stuns with ‘Konichiwa Bitches’ – a filtered blend of minimalist electro and cherry J-Pop, a Neneh Cherry sort dabbles with techno-rap on ‘Cobrastyle’, a weird Hilary Duff/Lisa Loeb/Pink hybrid strums through luscious pop-ballad, ‘Handle Me’, Janet Jackson scores a hook or two on ‘Crash and Burn Girl’ and ‘Should Have Known’, Kate Bush and Cindy Lauper drop in on ‘With Every Heartbeat’ and ‘Eclipse’, and Gwen Stefani gatecrashes the ridiculously catchy eighties pop-fest, ‘Who’s That Girl’.
Yes it’s derivative, yes it’s contrived, yes it craves the attention of fashionable youth and credibility as shamelessly as a Paul McCartney/Alex Turner duet –but it also comes up with the goods and makes for one hugely satisfying indulgence. If your bubblegum lost its flavour on the bedpost overnight, check out ‘Robotboy’. It puts it right back.