Pushing Up Daisies meanwhile, hymns a new relationship with til-death-us-do-part fealty. It never otherwise deals in prickly defensiveness; Family Man and What You Waiting For are not songs from which the author emerges covered in glory. At its centre are a suite of songs depicting in unsparing detail the collapse of Allen’s marriage, and the emotional tone shifts continually: from self-loathing to blame-laying, from denial to melancholy, nostalgia and regret.
Still, as Allen would doubtless point out, she never claimed to be perfect. All this publication's reviews Following a four-year hiatus from music and the release of her last record Sheezus… Allen’s early work bore the sonic hallmarks of an artist who’d spent their life with “one foot in the rave”, as she puts it on Trigger Bang, immersed in London’s urban music past and present: it takes an innate understanding of reggae, ska, calypso and hip-hop to blend them so successfully into the pop confection of 2006’s On Three, meanwhile, she’s confident enough to even try a gushy paean to her kids, something all rock and pop artists should be contractually obliged not to do – if Stevie Wonder at the zenith of his powers couldn’t get the baby snaps out without making you want to die of embarrassment, you’ve got no chance. It would be a hard listen were it not for the fact that the music is so great: tropical house shot in soft-focus and slow-motion, orchestrated 70s singer-songwriter ballads, every melody and chorus finished to a uniformly high standard. From the title down, No Shame has been trumpeted as a ballsy return to …
After largely ignoring Sheezus (which never FELT like Lily Allen to me), No Shame truly feels like a return to form and this album feels like her most honest and most encompassing album so far.
Over sparse barroom piano, Allen laments being left by a loved one. Over sparse barroom piano, Allen laments being left by a loved one. Writing on behalf of Telegraph.c… It’s the negative image of Elsewhere, her confidence shows up in other ways. I t’s hard not to heave a weary sigh as Lily Allen ’s fourth album gets under way. The lyrical update of When I’m 64 is very witty – will you still need me, it ponders, “when we’re just a strain on the NHS … when I’m a Daily Mail-reading know-what’s-best” – but feels weird after seven tracks that depict a marriage falling apart in unforgiving depth. The fusion of chill electro, a bit of reggae influence and ska like samples blend effortlessly. Lily Allen Lily Allen’s last album Sheezus wasn’t terrible, but she’s recently admitted she “made a record for the record company” and felt she “couldn’t sell it”. It’s as if Ingmar Bergman’s punishing Scenes from a Marriage had ended with the cast putting paper hats on and doing the conga.So, No Shame is a slightly odd album, where the horror of divorce is laid bare next to cheery pledges of everlasting love, where stuff wrapped in cliche coexists with songs that are painfully honest and revealing. “Family Man,” produced by It all feels very realistic.
Yet the rest of No Shame is not like its opening track at all. It’s the equivalent of 70s rock stars complaining that life on the road was lonely and tedious: a complaint about a downside of stardom that’s been repeated to the point of cliche.A groan of “here we go again” is no way to start any album, especially one heralded as a big comeback. There was something galvanising about the announcement of Lily Allen ’s new album No Shame. “Three” is No Shame’s most affecting song. Scattering your album with guest spots from UK rappers – Giggs, Meridian Dan, Lady Chann – could look like a desperate lunge for contemporaneity, but it never does. What she is, No Shame strongly suggests, is ready and able to tough it out. Nevertheless, as she demands to know why what’s written about her is “so far from the truth”, it’s hard to assuage the feeling that you’ve heard this all before, and not just from her. Lily Allen is a confessional singer, who subverts expectations using shiny pop arrangements as her body armor. For No Shame to succeed where Sheezus failed, the underlying … In a positive review, Nick Levine from the NME praised the album, Allen's songwriting and her artistic progress. At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 74, based on 21 reviews, indicating "generally positive reviews". Modern pop is already waist-deep in songs bemoaning haters, deceitful journalists and the disparity between public perception and reality.