Rogueish

These non-harmonic forms of musical intensification create a sense of affective intensification: the song builds and builds, teasing listeners with an implied (and expected) payoff of some sort. This payoff, however, is not “resolution”—it’s often more of a burst or a release, after which the song drops off/down. In Britney Spears’ “Till the World Ends,” the main moment of Soar is followed by silence.

Reminded of this by the new Saturdays album. The problem I’ve had with a lot of the Saturdays’ previous songs is that they take this harmonic resolution too literally, and their songs have tended to move from interesting verses to obvious, and tiresomely, uplifting choruses. Their new album largely avoids this problem by going hard with the rave-pop template and marginalizing the verse-chorus structure.