What's the weirdest record you've heard this year? Whatever it is, chances are it won't register on the same WTF scale as Farrah Abraham's debut. Boasting the tragicomic title My Teenage Dream Ended, and released as an accompaniment to her premature autobiography, this is a truly bizarre mix of generic Guetta-pop beats, those dubstep drilling sounds that feature heavily on Ministry Of Sound brostep compilations, and Abraham's abrasive AutoTuned vocals. It may use the same ingredients as much of the present pop landscape, but it sounds like something completely different; as if someone is translating chart music into an alien language and back again. It's an agonising, disconcerting clatter that's closer to Crystal Castles than the throbbing euro-cheese of Katie Price's musical venture Free To Love Again.
Series-linkers of MTV reality shows will know Abraham from her day job as star of Teen Mom, a US programme that follows the lives of girls sporting baby bumps under their cheerleader uniforms. She's the one with the backstory so tragic that X Factor audiences would balk (it's all there in the autobiography). None of the lyrics are actually lifted from it, though it is often hard to make out the words, so who really knows, but moments from her bleak life do bleed through: just absorb the emotion in "This bump doesn't go away. Neither does the fear on my face."
Fans have been cruel to Abraham, comparing her musical output to that of Paris Hilton or Rebecca Black. The Trend Guys website, confused over what they'd just heard, said, "For her sake, I really hope this was all just some kind of cruel joke." However, her album has found love in more avant garde circles; The Atlantic went as far as to call it "a lovely, maddening mess" that has more in common with outsider art than pop, and praised Abraham's bold take on postnatal depression, comparing the lyrics' visual imagery to David Lynch. All in all, it's as if Joey Essex had ditched Towie to record an album with Autechre and Lars von Trier.
Spurred on by the critical acclaim, Abraham is currently back in the studio, working on new music. She's even articulated her philosophy, explaining to MTV: "Music is a really hard industry for myself and there are so many ideas of what music should sound like, so for me I just was playing around with music and people took it way too serious." Even if nobody else knows what is going on here, at least she does.
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