Kingfisher

Hello sweeties,

Recently, I listened to Ellie Goulding’s last album, Halcyon. I put it on repeat a whole day, while I was working on the blog’s banner artwork and other stuff. And even after something like 10 listens, my opinion is mixed. It still is Pop music with a bit of Electro in it, something easy listening. But I’m pretty disappointed compared to Lights. I know I shouldn’t make this comparison, but how could you not do that? You always do.

It started “””well””” yet. The beginning of Don’t Say a Word is great, I really enjoyed it. But the rest of the song didn’t convince me. At this point, I was like “come on, there still are 12 songs”. But at the half of the album, the magic still didn’t happen. There was always something wrong in the songs.
For example, Only You. It’s a nice song. Until you get to that moment when there’s this super modified pitched voice and you’re just like :

“Y U NO HAVE USUAL VOICE”

It ruined my pleasure.

But after the first half, the album became interesting to my ears. Ritual and Explosions are brilliant, I enjoy them from A to Z.  I Need Your Love is pretty cool, you can clearly hear that Calvin Harris is in the place. Without Your Love makes me think of a feminine version of Friendly Fires in some ways. Figure 8 is not bad, if you’re not a Dubstep hater. It’s not Dubstep-Dubstep, but you can hear a bit of it in this track. I also liked Hanging On‘s rap passage. But only the rap passage.
Also, Atlantis made me laugh, because I thought that Goulding was singing “Think Zazu”, which makes absolutely no sense when you think about it (what I obviously didn’t do).

“WHAAAT”

Last words about the name of the album. As English is not my mother tongue, there are a lot of words that I don’t know. “Halcyon” was one of these. So, like anyone sensible, I googled it. And I bumped into this :

No, that’s not Zazu IRL

First thought : “WTF, where am I, who am I, is this 4th dimension?”

Then, I took a deep breath and read what Wikipedia was telling about it. Halcyons are birds and it seems that if you meet one of them, it’s a rest and peace omen.
The name’s album kind of make sense. I still think that Lights is way much better than Halcyon. But, if there’s one thing I do like about this album is that Goulding sounds fulfilled on it.