It’s as if Ingmar Bergman’s punishing Scenes from a Marriage had ended with the cast putting paper hats on and doing the conga.So, No Shame is a slightly odd album, where the horror of divorce is laid bare next to cheery pledges of everlasting love, where stuff wrapped in cliche coexists with songs that are painfully honest and revealing. Pilloried in the press for her every misfortune, Lily Allen scrutinizes her public persona on an album that dilutes staggering sincerity with uninspired beats.Thematically, Allen’s approach is more nuanced and genuine here than in the Fortunately, she resurfaces on “Waste” and “Trigger Bang,” two doses of perfect pop that could have appeared on Allen’s exceptional 2006 debut That vulnerability is the record's greatest asset, and Allen communicates it most effectively in the mid-album triptych “Family Man,” “Apples,” and “Three”—ballads that find her wandering the rubble of her marriage and slumping under the weight of parenthood.
I t’s hard not to heave a weary sigh as Lily Allen ’s fourth album gets under way. It’s the negative image of Elsewhere, her confidence shows up in other ways. Nevertheless, as she demands to know why what’s written about her is “so far from the truth”, it’s hard to assuage the feeling that you’ve heard this all before, and not just from her. Over sparse barroom piano, Allen laments being left by a loved one. The singer’s broken marriage is laid bare in an album that offers spikiness, regret and vulnerability via uniformly first-rate popOf course, Allen has plenty to feel prickly about – growing up in public, she’s been given the kind of hard time that Twitter’s grimmer corners and sidebar-of-shame authors seem to reserve exclusively for young women who make their voices heard. For No Shame to succeed where Sheezus failed, the underlying … What she is, No Shame strongly suggests, is ready and able to tough it out.
“Family Man,” produced by
It’s the equivalent of 70s rock stars complaining that life on the road was lonely and tedious: a complaint about a downside of stardom that’s been repeated to the point of cliche.A groan of “here we go again” is no way to start any album, especially one heralded as a big comeback.
“Three” is No Shame’s most affecting song.
In a positive review, Nick Levine from the NME praised the album, Allen's songwriting and her artistic progress. Writing on behalf of Telegraph.c… Scattering your album with guest spots from UK rappers – Giggs, Meridian Dan, Lady Chann – could look like a desperate lunge for contemporaneity, but it never does.
Review: Lily Allen Drops Subtle Truth Bombs On ‘No Shame” Over a decade after her debut hit “Smile,” the UK singer is s still a uniquely honest voice in pop. From the title down, No Shame has been trumpeted as a ballsy return to … There was something galvanising about the announcement of Lily Allen ’s new album No Shame. Following a four-year hiatus from music and the release of her last record Sheezus… Over sparse barroom piano, Allen laments being left by a loved one. Allen’s early work bore the sonic hallmarks of an artist who’d spent their life with “one foot in the rave”, as she puts it on Trigger Bang, immersed in London’s urban music past and present: it takes an innate understanding of reggae, ska, calypso and hip-hop to blend them so successfully into the pop confection of 2006’s On Three, meanwhile, she’s confident enough to even try a gushy paean to her kids, something all rock and pop artists should be contractually obliged not to do – if Stevie Wonder at the zenith of his powers couldn’t get the baby snaps out without making you want to die of embarrassment, you’ve got no chance.
It would be a hard listen were it not for the fact that the music is so great: tropical house shot in soft-focus and slow-motion, orchestrated 70s singer-songwriter ballads, every melody and chorus finished to a uniformly high standard. Writing a song from the point of view of a toddler proves impossible to do without sounding cutesy; the piano ballad accompaniment is the least interesting on the album.