Once again finding a harmonious balance with Giggs, who Lily Allen featured on the first single from the forthcoming No Shame, “Trigger Bang,” “Higher” is a melancholic (yet somehow uplifting in its ambient melodies) addition to what will be Allen’s fourth studio album. Exploring a theme that’s often present in the work of the Hammersmith chanteuse (e.g. “Smile,” “Shame For You” and “He Wasn’t There”), “Higher” easily contends with Beyonce’s Lemonade in terms of the sadness and anger a woman experiences upon learning of expected male fuckery–always, it seems, manifested in infidelity.
As Giggs’ opening lines excuse away his behavior with such justifications as, “Please, you know I rate queens” and “I just went out for Chinese/Had Chinese then couldn’t leave/I lost my phone and my cards and my keys,” Allen soon delves right into the pain of wasting one’s time on a person who very clearly doesn’t respect it (it being the time and the relationship), demanding, “Do me right.”
But, of course, in the face of such a simple request, most men tend to cower–which is precisely why Allen must call out the selfishness with, “You know what you’re doing, I won’t listen to another excuse. This time you blew it/The people you use, got them jumping through hoops/I won’t let you do it.” Unfortunately, no longer allowing him to do it entails that she’ll have to unshackle both herself and all the exhausted effort put into the rapport. Yet, as is usually the case with despondency and heartache, the transformation into vindictive rage comes eventually–specifically around the one minute and forty second mark, when Allen assures, “I can take this down to the wire/Soon, see if I fight fire with fire/Dig that grave, you’re such a bad liar/Stakes getting higher and higher.” This, of course, then leads into the chorus of Allen’s appropriately elevated vocals chanting, “Higher, higher, higher, higher.” And maybe that is where she’s gotten now that she’s learned to focus less on the whims of a man’s affections, and perhaps more on those of her children, one of which, Marnie Rose (sorry Ethel), is the subject of the other single Allen released in the past week.
“Three,” something of Allen’s more empathetic version of “Little Star” by Madonna, is half-told from the perspective of Allen’s daughter, as she begs her mother, “Please don’t go, stay here with me. It’s not my fault/I’m only three, I’m only three, I’m only three.” The tragic lament of this statement is punctuated by the dramatic, slowed down piano notes that bring an added element of anguish that we as the listener experience through the lens of a child that just wants to spend time with her mother. Her daughter even tries to tantalize with the offer, “When things feel black and white, we’ll do some colouring in/When you want to play with me.” This hint of passive aggressiveness is one that can only come from the mind of an adult who knows all too well the effects of a mother’s perceived abandonment of her progeny.
Allen taps into Marnie Rose’s mind further by remarking, “You say you’re going to work but you don’t say how long for/You say it’s work but I’m not sure.” This doubt that creeps in is difficult to shake once a youth begins to mistrust the loyalty and consistency of their parent. But, hopefully, Marnie Rose will later see, based on this song, that she was always on Allen’s mind. Ethel, it seems, maybe less so.
As Allen stated in her latest radio interview on Beats 1, the songs from No Shame are reflective of the fact that, “There haven’t been any outside sources telling me what’s right and wrong, what’s going to work for radio and what isn’t, so that’s really great.” And it seems that this lack of concern for worrying about “hit-readiness” is taking Allen in a more mature direction than the one that she began during her Ibiza days. Not to say that those weren’t fine times as well–only now, it’s likely just a trigger–bang!–to Allen to revisit that sound in her career.
