Robyn has been one of the shining lights of the pop landscape in the last decade, and her most winning moments comes when she successfully marries a great pop/dance beat with raw, emotional lyrics. She's used terse violin stabs to up the ex-boyfriend drama on Be Mine, applied the propulsive ebullience of house music to a sincere tale of a failed relationship in With Every Heartbeat and gave the scum and lowlife of the world an uptempo lullaby with Dream on.
On her latest release, simply titled Body Talk (even though it is the third in a series that began), she gives us another instant classic 'Call ur Girlfriend'. On the backbone of a stomping dance-floor filling bassline, Robyn is seen to be addressing a potential new beau and outlining his next move "Call your girlfriend... it's time you had the talk". She continues on with the orders, listing rote break-up phrases one after the other "Say it's not her fault... Tell her you never meant to hurt no-one". But with Robyn's beautifully aching delivery it's hard to tell whether she is sympathezing with the girl she's advising this guy to dump, or just coldly telling him what do out of sheer lust (or love?).
Great songs in this day and age need to move not only our feet and touch our hearts, they need to make us think too, even if only a little. Robyn does a little of all of those things and makes something memorable and touching out of it, even if we're not sure who's side we're on at the end of it.
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