Camila Cabello’s new album presents an existential threat to songwriting

It is always interesting to observe the ways in which pop stars try to negotiate first growing up, and then growing old. From teen scream to respected mainstay to elder states(wo)man is not an easy path to walk without a few stumbles. At certain times, it requires making some blatantly strategic moves.

Few readers will remember that the first solo single George Michael released after dissolving Wham! was called ‘I Want Your Sex’, a forgettable bump-and-grind with a steamy video designed purely to shift audience expectations away from all things teenybopper and towards a more adult-orientated market. The song was banned by the BBC during daylight hours. Michael would have been thrilled.

More recently, when Miley Cyrus wanted to kill off her sweet Disney alter-ego Hannah Montana, she swung around half-naked on a wrecking ball for four minutes. It wasn’t subtle, exactly, but the message was effectively delivered and duly received.

I doubt whether Camila Cabello’s reinvention will end up being quite so successful. Cabello is a Cuban-American singer who got her break on The X Factor as a member of vocal group Fifth Harmony. That kind of legacy can quickly become an albatross. After a decade as a sincere, straight-edged pop star – her early single ‘Havana’ remains her most well-known – on her fourth album she throws herself into sexed-up, hyper-pop adulthood by going blonde, swearing quite a lot and auto-tuning her voice almost out of existence.

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Cabello has touted C,XOXO as a return to her ‘first passion of songwriting’, yet at times the album presents an existential threat to what songwriting actually means. On the opening track, ‘I Luv It’, she shares a co-credit for writing the lyrics, while seven other people composed the music. After all that, it still sounds suspiciously like ‘I Got It’ by Charli XCX. The generic ballad ‘B.O.A.T.’ boasts five lyricists and eight more songwriters.

C,XOXO is very short – the 14 songs barely stretch to half an hour – yet it still scratches around for solid ideas. Many tracks are fragments. One consists of 47 seconds of rapper BLP Kosher talking about how Cabello’s music got him through a rough time in his life. It would make a nice voicemail, perhaps, but I’m not sure it merits the honour of being listed as a song with a title on a record.

‘Chanel No. 5’ has a dreamy kind of charm, but even the appealing Cubano groove of ‘Pretty When I Cry’ takes its lyrical cues from a song by the far more interesting Olivia Rodrigo. Cabello barely appears on some of the tracks at all. Factor in the long list of usual-suspect guest performers – Drake, Lil Nas X, Playboi Carti – and C,XOXO feels like a record on which the artist wants so badly to grow up that she evolves from her past incarnations practically into thin air.

At least no one is going to make Marc Almond play second fiddle on his own album. Best known for being one half of early 1980s synth-pop duo Soft Cell, melodrama runs thick in his veins. To duet with Almond is to know you’ve been in a musical duel. This is an artist with a Piafian thirst for the single spotlight. Big voice, sharp elbows. Good for him.

Almond has always been an interesting singer. Though at times his work has been as boudoir-fixated as any of today’s priapic pop stars – I refer readers to ‘Sex Dwarf’ and Mother Fist and Her Five Daughters for starters – there has always been a tenderness, a wee-small-hours melancholy in his voice which has allowed him to convincingly tackle everything from Russian folk songs to the works of Jacques Brel, Scott Walker, Juliette Greco and Charles Aznavour, not to mention taking a swing at Baudelaire.

For Almond, growing older with conviction has meant presenting a moving target. Here, at 66, he presents a well-judged, rather autumnal set of off-piste cover versions. All the punks and new-wavers were proggers and hippies before the wind changed, of course, and Almond can convincingly tackle Colin Blunstone, Don McLean and Paul Anka without losing his footing. Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson even pops up to assist on a stirring version of King Crimson’s ‘I Talk to the Wind’.

The connecting theme, such as it is, befits the lengthening shadows: the songs are united by notions of the elemental, of a closeness to the earth and non-denominational spirituality. I’m Not Anyone works rather well, while also providing a gentle lesson to any young ’uns seeking longevity: first, last and always, know thyself.