Body Talk Pt. 1

Whilst Christina Aguilera's recently released Bionic album suffers under the weight of its 18 tracks, Sweden's Robin Carlsson, aka Robyn, offers up just eight tracks here. Body Talk Pt 1 is, as the name implies, the first part of what will eventually become a trilogy, with the two sequels both due this year. Rather than having all the material done and dusted, however, some of the songs are still being recorded, with release dates subject to change.

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"I'm always going to feel like this person on the outside looking in," Robyn recently told Popjustice. The Swedish singer and songwriter has no fear of pop: A platinum seller in her own country, Robyn cracked the Billboard top 10 in the late 1990s working with famed teen-pop producer Max Martin. As the daughter of a couple who ran an independent theater company, however, Robin Miriam Carlsson is also a woman who enjoys doing things her own way.

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If you wind up liking Body Talk Pt. 1, you’ll be pleased to know that there’s more on its way, which you admittedly might have guessed from the record’s title. Robyn is keen to let you know that she’s doing it this way because she loves this damn job: the eight-song, half-hour duration might sound miserly, but has supposedly come about because the Swedish synth-pop figurehead just couldn’t wait to grace us with the songs she’d finished. To this end, there’ll be two further, similarly slimline, volumes of Body Talk along in the near future.

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Even with all of her art-school background, post-modern sense of self-awareness, and media-savvy command over her image, Lady Gaga has yet to produce a song that dismantles and tinkers with the complex position of the post-Madonna female pop star as brilliantly as Robyn does on “Fembot”, the first advance single off of her proposed trilogy of albums for 2010, beginning here with Body Talk Pt. 1. Credit this, possibly, to Gaga’s strain to stand above the throng of pre-fab pop princesses while at the same time usurping what was still until very recently their market, but dance floor veteran Robyn appears far more comfortable with her own contradictions. Maybe it has a lot to do with the strange—and quite distinctly post-millennial—arc her career has taken, moving from briefly famous teen pop star in the ‘90s to (after a few years of obscurity everywhere outside of her native Sweden) Pitchfork-approved hipster darling the following decade, but Body Talk Pt. 1, and “Fembot” especially, find Robyn lacing her music with the cheekiness and wit that Lady Gaga mostly keeps on reserve for her outfits and music videos.

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