167. Annie - Anniemal (2004)

I'm not a fan of most modern dance-pop; it seems to me a genre that reached its apex with Michael Jackson and never really recovered since then. The very idea of "indie dance-pop" is enough to make my brain explode, because has there ever been a type of music where commercial success and radio play is so intrinsic, so utterly required? Dance-pop seems to exist only as a function of commercial success, the logical endpoint of a desire to make music as simple and unoffensive as possible. Yet every once in a while something good sneaks through, like this one. Annie's debut record is everything you'd want in a modern pop record: great vocals, great hooks, great production. The problem is that it's too unpretentious. This kind of music is pretentious as hell: fashionable guest stars and incongruous hip-hop sections are the rule. Not here. It's just 80s-style pop, through and through. It makes no concessions to modern trends; it just sounds as though Annie and her producers loved early 80s Madonna and wanted to make an album in that style as accurately as they could. It's pointless to talk about singles here: they could all be singles. It's that kind of record. It's shallow, but this music is designed to be shallow; one might as well castigate a Slayer record for being too loud. For what it is, it's as good as it can be. A weird kind of minor miracle.

MY RATING: 8.1

Annie - "Happy Without You"