This year’s dispatch from Kevin Barnes’s 20-year art-pop project is accomplished but slightly exhausting. Lead single It’s Different for Girls is impeccably catchy electro-pop, betrayed by lyrics shallower than a Facebook meme. It might be easier to respect its trite musings on gender – girls are “mercurial creatures”, apparently – if the artwork didn’t include a line drawing of four pairs of perky breasts.
When Barnes applies his huge gift for melody to less predictable pastiches than usual there are gorgeous moments, like the swirling coda to My Fair Lady, or the motorik sulk of Chap Pilot. But mostly it feels like he’s lost in the dress-up box, never quite finding a mask to fit his ever-changing face.
