“Power” is a righteous feminist empowerment anthem with an impassioned, soulful lead. Patient grooves mean these songs sink or swim on how powerfully Katy sells the vocals and lyrics. The grooves feel light and free, where your textbook Katy Perry cut can often come off like a freight train barreling toward a massive drop. The team lacks the mathematical precision of Perry’s go-to production crew - Martin, Shellback, Luke, Stargate, and Benny Blanco, give or take a stray - but also the nagging urgency. Katy’s search for new collaborators yielded a good group: Contributors include British producer-songwriters Jack Garratt and Duke Dumont, indie dance sensations Hot Chip and Purity Ring, rap and pop maestros Mike WiLL Made-It, Jeff Bhasker, and DJ Mustard, and pop-radio veterans Max Martin and Shellback. The other story of Witness (and a lot of modern pop music) is that you can get just about anyone to make a quirky dance-pop bop in 2017. Luke’s a no-show on Witness, and whether that’s thanks to Katy showing solidarity, slickly distancing herself from a radioactive situation, or getting caught up in some fortuitous label red tape, it helps to know that this album was conceived without the closer that helped sail the last four out of the park. Perry’s silence on the matter was jarring - even Taylor Swift spoke out. Luke - producer and cowriter of “I Kissed a Girl,” “Teenage Dream,” “California Gurls,” “E.T.,” “Roar”… essentially all of Perry’s hits - lost major music-industry trust and cachet in 2014 as he fought accusations of verbal and sexual abuse from Kesha with a countersuit suggesting she’d cooked it all up to get out of her contract. Was all that thrashing actually just a search for new personnel? Dr. KP5 seemed rudderless at a juncture where Katy ought to know how to get a campaign off the ground. Early singles jostled between bantamweight philosophical musings (“Chained to the Rhythm”) and big rap collaborations that further crossed up the purposeful pop ethos (“Swish Swish,” “Bon Appetit”) and made Katy look thirsty for an unfussed cool she’s too theatrical to sell. Perry’s woke initiative floundered in a string of public gaffes that raised questions over the singer’s political acumen. This is a best-case scenario, really, considering the album’s rollout, which could charitably be described as troubled. But it isn’t the “purposeful pop” opus she promised in prerelease interviews either. I’ve got good news and bad news: Katy Perry’s new album Witness isn’t the pop Hindenburg crash we’ve been bracing ourselves for all spring.
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