Sally Shapiro’s first album, Disco Romance, was a cute little Swedish disco-pop confection, introducing the world at large to the shy big-eyed stare and trembling-hand stammers of one of dance music’s least likely heroines. In a way, Sally Shapiro has, since then, become a sort of anti-kitten and anti-Kittin, refusing to allow the fame of chanteuse-dom to star her eyes. Maybe that’s why I’m enjoying her second album, My Guilty Pleasure, so much more than I did her first.
Around the time Disco Romance hit, the space disco phenomena, basically blowing up anything with a vaguely Italo or Balearic sound into mega mega hits and boring the crap out of me in the process, was taking full-swing. As such, other than “I’ll Be By Your Side”, the majority of the minimalist disco trappings producer Johan Bjorn draped around her schoolgirl voice left me entirely uninterested. But in the years since, the music of Sally Shapiro has found her mature from the girl wracked with fear in the corner of the school dance into someone who will walk up to you, cheeks rosy from blushing, meet your gaze for a brief second and introduce herself in a way so utterly shy it’s endearing.There’s even a certain air of mystery about her these days.
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“Dying In Africa’s” the best example of the newfound poetic darkness in Sally Shapiro’s sound-over a beat that no longer seems tossed off, that literally pulses with heartache, Sally sings that she “won’t get over you” even if she “dies in Africa”.No idea what that means, absolutely none-but don’t tell me you don’t want to ask her out if only to find out.
The rest of My Guilty Pleasure is like that-in fragmens and snippets, Sally lays hints like breadcrumbs out as to what’s going on behind those frosty eyes, and this time the music compliments her. No longer sleepy but not quite seductive (again, she’s the anti-Kittin, you won’t find any of the activities that went on in the back of “Frank Sinatra”’s limo happening here-Sally’s the girl who brings 2 books to the party you invite her to, the second just in case the finished the one she’s currently reading), the entire Sally Shapiro project has blossomed into an intriguing, grin-inducing half-hour collection of wintery shy-girl dance jams. She’s never been the girl you brought to the party, but now she’s definitely the one you want to leave with.
