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Sally Shapiro - My Guilty Pleasure
| Pitchfork |
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Sally Shapiro's wilting-wallflower persona has always been as central to her appeal as the actual music that carries her (fake) name is, and that's okay. It's okay because this is one of those situations where the story and the music feed into each other and complement each other beautifully. The persona, whether it was ever really real or not, wasn't part of the noise that kept us from hearing the music; it was as central to the music as her actual voice. And anyway, her actual voice told her story better than any press bio. So here's the story: Sally Shapiro is the stage name of a Swedish woman whose real name we don't know. We don't know her name either because she's painfully shy or because she just doesn't want us to know. Before Disco Romance, her incandescent debut album, she wouldn't let strangers photograph her, and she wouldn't sing her songs with her producer in the room. And yet she and her producer, Swedish Italo-disco dude Johan Agebjörn, got each other perfectly. He fed her airy, delicate minimal dance tracks, and she cooed over them in her barely there wisp of a voice. That voice implied so much: Sadness, nostalgia, devotion....full text |
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| Popmatters |
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Sally Shapiro, the icy disco queen who captured hearts in 2007 with her superb debut Disco Romance, returns with a solid (if a tad familiar) sophomore effort. Backed again by producer Johan Agebjorn, the anonymous Swedish singer, My Guilty Pleasure is another compact slice of shining discopop, at once blasé about its influences and revelatory in its emotional range. The thing is, Sally Shapiro is a little in danger of becoming Agebjorn and Shapiro’s hobby. They’re famously reticent about performing live, and pulled out last year even from a run of European DJ gigs. And the explanation, on Shapiro’s website, runs: “What if you just want to be a normal person with a normal job, record songs in the weekends, and spend the holidays picking blueberries instead of going on tour.” But no great musician in any genre has built a career out of hours, and though the group’s amateur spirit can be charming, it can also be a recipe for sameness. Turns out, you have to work long hours to reinvent your sound album to album....full text |
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| Residentadvisor |
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Sally Shapiro isn't who you think she is. I don't mean she's lost to us now. No, Sally Shapiro is a false front, a pseudonym for producer Johan Agebjörn and a shy Gothenburg-based chanteuse who wishes to remain anonymous. Emerging on Wolfram Eckert's small Diskokaine label in 2006, the duo's debut album, Disco Romance, was keenly timed, coinciding with the renewed fascination with Italo disco and the overt romanticism and melancholic gloss of '80s electro-pop like the Pet Shop Boys. But that was 2006. With the Italo ship havin' not sailed by 2009 so much as picked up anchor and taken a feel for prevailing winds, now comes the duo's follow-up for Munich's great Permanent Vacation. Frankly, My Guilty Pleasure does sometimes hew disconcertingly close to the pop-sweet disco of the debut; "Looking at the Stars" retreads the wistful blue-eyed Rhodes of "I Know" almost note for note, and "Love in July" nags the ear as a Sally Shapiro-preset workout. But Shapiro's sophomore effort is so comfortable with its own coyness and heart-on-sleeve Eurovision pop nuggetry that it seems short-sighted to fault the two for returning to such a wholesome formula. (US consumers take note however: Two of Pleasure's best songs—the wintry ice-cap ballad "He Keeps Me Alive" and the twinkly slow-mo surge of "Jackie Jackie"—can be found on Paper Bag's 2007 edition of the debut.) The title hints at My Guilty Pleasure's homebound appeal; the album art aptly captures its grinning blisses, its avoiding eyes—a record you play in 3 AM cycles with switch-dead lights and sleep-dead neighbors. It's not for parties, not for warming up BBQ coals or keeping the beat alive at late-summer fiestas. There's always been something about Sally Shapiro that seemed more yours than ours or theirs, a very personal address to be played too loud to an empty apartment in pajamas....full text |
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