Sally Shapiro's wilting-wallflower persona has always been as central to her appeal as the actual music that carries her (fake) name is, and that's okay. It's okay because this is one of those situations where the story and the music feed into each other and complement each other beautifully. The persona, whether it was ever really real or not, wasn't part of the noise that kept us from hearing the music; it was as central to the music as her actual voice. And anyway, her actual voice told her story better than any press bio.
So here's the story: Sally Shapiro is the stage name of a Swedish woman whose real name we don't know. We don't know her name either because she's painfully shy or because she just doesn't want us to know. Before Disco Romance, her incandescent debut album, she wouldn't let strangers photograph her, and she wouldn't sing her songs with her producer in the room. And yet she and her producer, Swedish Italo-disco dude Johan Agebjörn, got each other perfectly. He fed her airy, delicate minimal dance tracks, and she cooed over them in her barely there wisp of a voice. That voice implied so much: Sadness, nostalgia, devotion.
And now the follow-up. When Disco Romance came out, I compared Shapiro to Belle and Sebastian, whose early-on reticence similarly defined them and gave their music context and weight. Shapiro's in a little bit of a Boy With the Arab Strap situation now. There's still an air of mystery surrounding her, but it's been depleted a bit. She's done some interviews, she's let dance producers manipulate her songs on a pair of remix albums, and she's even gone on a quick DJ tour. Since that tour, Shapiro and Agebjörn have announced that touring just ain't her thing, but it's done. She's out there. She's got a Twitter, for fuck's sake.
I'm not sure if I should read the general watered-down quality of My Guilty Pleasure as a symptom of Shapiro being out in the world or what, but that sense of exquisite isolation from Disco Romance is gone now. The songs are shorter and packed with more activity. The tempos are faster. Shapiro's voice is still slight and sometimes wounded, but it doesn't fully give into titanic emotion the way it did on Disco Romance [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| . Instead, it's an album of vaguely slight dance-pop songs. That's fine, but it's not great. Disco Romance was great.
The good news: These dance-pop songs, slight as they are, are sometimes very good. Agebjorn is mostly working with the same materials as on the last album-- twinkly synths, vintage 4/4 drums, Moroder bass oscillations-- but he's using them to fill more space, not letting them fade into the background the same way. "Moonlight Dance" has slap-bass, which is weird. The pitched-up "Save Your Love" track is fast and bubbly enough that it could almost be Latin freestyle. These tracks gleam, but they don't necessarily sound perfectly suited to Shapiro. Often, it's easy to imagine someone her opposite (like mid-decade Madonna, say) singing over them.
As for Shapiro, her voice still has a perfectly evocative quality, and so, sometimes do her lyrics. She's looking at the stars tonight and only thinking of you. Someone she loves turned her down, and she didn't feel her head touch the ground. That kind of thing. You get some of the weirdly poetic sentence-structure that only seems to come from people who aren't native English speakers: "I walk the streets I used to live upon with you." "Dying in Africa" seems to just be about being dumped, and then she drops this tiny bombshell: "I won't get over you, even if I died in Africa." Huh? She never tells. Well played.
But My Guilty Pleasure doesn't have the same sense of character and place that Disco Romance had, and it also doesn't succeed as the straight-up dance-pop record it seemingly wants to be because the melodies aren't there. (Disco Romance would've made a much better straight-up pop record if they'd sped it up a bit.) It's a sad case of an artist forgetting what makes her great, settling for what makes her merely good instead.
