Allie X (Toronto singer-songwriter Alexandra Hughes) is simultaneously edgy and reassuringly familiar; her attention-grabbing visuals bring Melanie Martinez and Lady Gaga to mind, but her brand of sleek, earworm-y minimalist pop is sonically closer to contemporaries such as Anna of the North, Poppy, TOPS, and Shura. In an interview with OUT, she defined ‘X’ as “the tool to fill in those empty spaces, and the thing you need to reclaim your identity when you feel confused about who you are. Because it really gives you permission to be anything”.
X recently released a music video for the remix of “Casanova”, a song from her debut album CollXtion II (June 2017) that incorporated the stoically angelic vocals of Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter VÉRITÉ (Kelsey Byrne) last November. Its lyrics echo Lauryn Hill’s “Doo-Wop (That Thing)”, Sade’s “Smooth Operator”, Britney Spears’ “Womanizer” and her own “Paper Love” in terms of content, filled with warnings about a dangerously alluring heartbreaker: ‘You're a heavenly creature/ With a real dark agenda/ You can turn a believer/ To a damn dirty sinner ’.
As with her breakout single “Catch”, X intrigues by including the somatic effects of lust and infatuation in her familiar tale of romantic risk and danger. She’s ‘shaking up a fear’ and possibly having a seizure; intimacy is described as the interactions between different body parts: ‘I'm here lying on the bed of your tongue/ My heart listens to the sound of your war drum’. The physical and metaphorical gain equal weight on the song’s crisp chorus: ‘Casanova fucked me over/ Left me dying for your love/ Casanova, Casanova/ Now you're all I'm thinking of’.
As the album’s closing track made clear in no uncertain terms, "True Love Is Violent". There is momentum, bliss, euphoria, paralysis and devastation (but also a relatively positive outlook, since X is not completely romanticizing a masochistic idea of interdependence). Her head may be out of step with her heart, but the song itself smoothly obliterates the line between romantic ecstacsy and misery with its impeccable production value and delightfully off-kilter reimagining of ‘80s pop.
