Animal

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that an album that opens with the words ‘I like your beard’ and closes with a song dedicated to dirty picture messages couldn’t possibly interest you. Well, bear with me for a moment.

Merely by way of analogy, of course, Katy Perry meets an alcoholic Miley Cyrus in the form of LA-born Kesha Sebert, and while I openly admit that a large portion of debut album Animal is overworked R ‘n’ B tripe, I must also relate that I found a very worthwhile edge to her debaucherous pop.

As a whole, Animal sounds like someone very clever has made an album based on things they overheard drunk schoolgirls brag about on the 13a. Sex, partying, drinking, dancing, drag queens and ’erm, partying are the only things on the 22-year-old’s mind and sometimes, like with the ridiculous stylising of her own name, it’s a case of So Bad It’s Great.

Britney would step over her own divorce lawyer to get her mitts on a whopper of a track like ‘Boots & Boys’; the scathing ode to an older man ‘Dinosaur’ is nothing short of hilarious (“Not long ‘til you’re a senior citizen/ And you can strut around with that sexy tank of oxygen”); and the No Doubt-esque ‘Backstabber’ is equally enjoyable.

Overproduced? But of course. In fact, there’s so many unneccessary bleeps and honks on Animal it’s not so much an album anymore as a robotic noise machine hooked up to the sensory cortexes of Ke$ha’s Jack Daniels-damaged brain. It’s all part of the tawdry fun.

A word of warning; a handful of delightful trash pop aside, much of Ke$ha’s AutoTuned warbling is practically unlistenable. ‘Blah Blah Blah’, for instance, speaks for itself.

So there we have it. Raunchy, philthy (if Sebert can take liberties with spelling, so can I…) and obnoxious – this record’s going straight back to its roots, that is, the back of the 13a, where schoolgirls will be blaring it for months to come.