I’ll be honest, when I read ‘Swedish Idol’ in the press release I didn’t think I was going to take to Olivia Aliotti’s debut single, that it might turn out to be formulaic, and even an excuse to scream every so often so as to prove that the singer can do that.
Moreover, the fact that Olivia has that homogenised North American accent and slightly breathless style that might belong to Miley, or Ariana, or Selena, or Katy, or Carly Rae or even the other Olivia didn’t inspire me at first but let’s be fair she is American (she has dual citizenship along with Swedish) and this song, the intriguingly entitled ‘Delayed Teenage Angst’ does chronicle her journey from California to Stockholm and the difficulties she faced there coming to terms with a new school, friends, and everything that goes with it – and she does it in a jolly ‘you can’t keep me down’ fashion.
What’s more both the song and her delivery of it quickly endeared me to her.
It starts off hesitatingly as if to suggest the first faltering steps she took in her new environment and anyone bold enough to rhyme catharsis and nervous in the first line gets my vote. And she manages to convey that angst from start to finish.
There are numerous smart lines – “Sunset in the rear view”, “habits to break/guess I’ve got delayed teenage angst”, “Even the popular girls were depressed/I know that now but I’m still such a mess”, and “You can leave High School but High School won’t leave you”, which I guess equates to you can take the girl out of The Valley but you can’t take The Valley out of the girl.
Musically it’s interesting because Olivia flaunts some of the rules of this particular brand of mainstream pop, for example by throwing in a fair portion of quite heavy rock towards the end, before and just after the song has settled into a short spell of acoustic guitar-led bliss in the bridge, which it bookends. That’s risky but it works for me.
Hence the song takes on the form of a tuneful pop song-cum-rock opera and in some ways it reminds me of Daz Sampson’s UK Eurovision entry from 2006, ‘Teenage Life’, even though that was a rap song.
From here in the UK I don’t know how Swedish listeners will interpret it, whether the melancholia that pervades so many songs there will influence opinions of a light-hearted treatment of something the Swedes would probably take more seriously.
Internationally I think she has a hit here if she can get the airplay. ‘Delayed Teenage Angst’ ticks a lot of boxes such as that it deals with a theme that might be well known to many young listeners in increasingly peripatetic societies, it has a memorable tune and that, well, you can dance to it.
Find her on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/oliviaaliottiartist
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oliviaaliotti/
