Sky Ferreira
Night Time, My Time

There are those who prefer blood over glitter and sequins.

Among them seems to be the young Sky Ferreira, who after a couple of EPs and singles of unlistenable and harmless chart pop, has decided to immerse herself in cursedness and affliction. Having already stumbled upon that horrible track "Everything Is Embarrassing", I remained skeptical of the unjustified hype surrounding this frail girl of unrestrained audacity.

Yet there are some who say she rebelled against it all. Against the majors, the radio, the marketing, and all that crap. Ferreira is not your usual Britney Spears, yet she is trapped in the system that wants her to be just that. She writes lyrics, music, and lives with the desire to make beautiful music.

Poor Sky suffers, condemned to be beautiful, to be considered vacuous.
And even though, at first glance, she started to get on my nerves, I began to be intrigued by her case: rumors that her debut album is inspired by Suicide, that it defies the most fashionable pop conventions, and so on.

And then there's the cover. A photo by Gaspar Noé (yes, him) where the singer-songwriter is shown naked, fragile, and shattered in the shower. She is beautiful. She could be a femme fatale, yet in this shot, she is reduced to a slender ghost.
It was useless. I had to give her a chance. 

And yes, "Night Time, My Time" is not as bad as I expected.
But listening to it is painful.
It's painful because you can sense how this young woman possesses talent and musical taste, flair and elegance, risk, and voice, yet she seems to be always imprisoned by that monster called the market that suffocates her, strangles her and forces her to be what she is not.

On one hand, we have a truly splendid track like "Omanko", a tank with Suicide reminiscences and a disturbing cryptic text that apparently talks about suicide and rape and on the other, there are chart crap like "You're Not The One" and "24 Hours".

And then there's the beautiful and dark closing of the title track or the pop - pure, yes, but intelligent- of "Heavy Metal Heart" beside uninspired episodes, completely devoid of inspiration and destroyed by production that could have turned them into little gems.

Thus, this debut album is nothing but a continuous wandering between genius and crap, between confirmation that Sky does have neurons and the sadness in realizing that she is still a bit of a slave to the charts, in which -promptly- she does not appear. 

Come on, Sky, one day I know you'll manage to release the album you've been wanting to write for years. Maybe when you get your first wrinkles. And then you'll conquer the world. And I'll be here waiting for you. And you'll be rotten and finally ugly, but with a heart this big.
I swear, I'm waiting for you right here.  

"I'm gearing up, and the fucking Japanese Omanko. The Japanese Jesus"