Friday, April 21, 2017

Video Of The Week: Athena Andreadis

Here's what happens when songwriters use songwriting software and a rhyme dictionary:

 The songs is Stronger, and the video was directed by Monika Lightstone.

If you don't know Athena Andreadis, she is an Anglo-Greek singer-songwriter who has collaborated with a ton of people in the past decade, including singing background vocals on the late Leonard Cohen's Traveling Light, off his final album, 2016's You Want It Darker. Cohen had a thing for thin, classically beautiful blondes, after all...

Now, I don't want to rag on Andreadis, as she has won writing awards in College, and the BBC's Morag Reavley called her first album, 2007's Breathe With Me, "Intimate, thoughtful, (and) original". However, you have to agree that Stronger is none of those. It's too arranged and studio-soulless to be intimate, it's too cliché'd to be thoughtful, and nothing about it is original, from the music to the chord progression to the arrangements to the insipid lyrics. Even the title is ridiculously unoriginal, what with the likes of Kelly Clarkson, Britney Spears, Ai, Sugababes, Kanye West, Mary J. Blige and Jennette McCurdy having released songs with that title in recent years - and a shitload more that I don't know about, and a ton more before all of these.

I had looked her up when I bought Cohen's album, and it seemed at the time - six months ago - that she had registered as "alright", not "wholly unoriginal" in my mind, so it's possible this song doesn't reflect her latest album, Ready For The Sun - or it's also possible that producer Ethan Allen (Ben Harper, Sheryl Crow) assassinated her style and asepticized and dumbed it down for her to better connect to an American audience.

Either way, I had expected a much better product from her. From anyone, really, but someone who wins awards shouldn't dive this low, ever.

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