Bodyrockin' with Tove Lo

It's always strange when a pop star I admire releases a song I dislike. I start to reassess our relationship... Why are they beholden to this thing that, to me, seems so meagre? Were the other songs, the ones we agreed on, just a fluke? Is this the beginning of the end?

I've been faced with that situation for a couple of weeks as Tove Lo - indisputably the best new pop star of 2014 - started the teaser campaign for her new single, Talking Body. A giddy song about falling in love, its lyrical conceit is basically a single entendre version of "if I said you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me?"

"If we're talking body
You've got a perfect one
So put it on me
If you treat me right
We fuck for life
On and on and on".
That "fuck" feels gratuitous, doesn't it? And I'm not saying that in a prudish way - Tove deploys the f-bomb brilliantly on some of her other songs ("on my good days I am charming as fuck", from Moments, being my favourite example). Maybe she's trying to capture that first-flush, head-over-heels, I-am-so-horny-right-now frisson of a new relationship - but the lyric is too clinical. It's missing the cheeky allure of, say, Prince's Erotic City, which says the same thing with a much bigger twinkle in its eye.

Anyway, the video comes out today and, while Tove and I may not see eye to eye on the song, the visuals are pretty stunning. It's a one-take sex and crime fantasy that's X-rated in places, but justifiably so in the context.


Tove Lo - Talking Body

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