Rita Ora, “Phoenix”: At 21, singer Rita Ora seemed poised to knock down the Lady Gaga Ceremonial Door to pop megastardom —the Kosovo-born singer had three No. 1 singles, opened for Coldplay and met her idol, Gwen Stefani, at an awards show. Then disturbing things happened. She believed her label, Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, marooned her with little promotion or attention, and they sued each other; she split with her boyfriend, DJ Calvin Harris, prompting him to yank the hit he produced, “I Will Never Let You Down,” from her debut album, “Ora.”
Six years and a recurring “Fifty Shades” film-series role later, Ora has signed to a new label, Atlantic, and made an album to show off her true, unfiltered personality, freed from controlling labels and vengeful ex-boyfriends. And it’s … a little boring. Ora has a clean, strong pop voice, and she sounds fantastic in “First Time High” singing ooh-ooh-oohs against the synth hooks. She nicely shifts from low to high in “Only Want You,” building tension for the lyric “I don’t want to wear another minidress/to impress/another potential problem.”
Disappointingly, she shies away from saying anything at all. “For You,” her hit from the “Fifty Shades Freed” soundtrack, is jammed with cliches: “I’m free as a bird,” “been waiting for a lifetime for you.” “Summer Love” barely tells the beginning of a love story, and Ora sings bouncy opener “Anywhere” as if she wants a fancy vacation rather than needing an escape from something consequential. It’s only when the more interesting Cardi B, Bebe Rexha and Charli XCX show up for “Girls” (“I just wanna kiss girls, girls, girls”) that the album shows idiosyncrasy, humor and drama.
Ed Harcourt, “Beyond The End”: Known for lines like “got a suitcase and a passport/but all I really want is you,” veteran British singer-songwriter Ed Harcourt bought a 1910 Hopkinson Baby Grand and downshifted to piano instrumentals (plus violin and cello) for this album of pristine background music. (It’s a break, he has said, from “the sheer barrage of news and vomit being rained down on us on a daily basis.”)
An accomplished pianist who studied Debussy, Mozart and Philip Glass, Harcourt opts for mood and minimalism, possibly to score a nonexistent movie about wandering through the forest with a thunderstorm on the way.
The titles are darkly evocative: “Wolves Changes Rivers” (the music suggests a new ballerina’s tentative first steps), “There Is Still a Fire” (a sketch for a subdued Christmas carol?), “For My Father” (equally playful and bleak), and finally “Whiskey Held My Sleep to Ransom” (a deeper, more conflicted “Feelings”).
— Steve Knopper, Newsday
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