Planningtorock
All Love’s Legal
5/5

Almost simultaneously with the German Winter Olympic team’s multicoloured entry into the Russian national stadium, gender-bender Planningtorock (Jam Rostron) has released her new album All Love’s Legal. With various gay marriage laws being altered, or in some cases reinforced, the issue of homophobia is extremely prevalent; luckily, there are artists such as Planningtorock who are fighting for equality. The producer and Knife collaborator’s latest offering is not just a piece of glistening electronic music, but a performative political statement of intent.

More than those endless boring feminist articles in the press, this record, sleeved in a wonderfully garish and probably tongue-in-cheek pink negative photo of Rostron, is a staggering, liberating and world-altering experience. It stares gender in the eye and makes it wet itself. With candid yet compelling lyrics hollered over a luscious, glossy electronic sound, Planningtorock has suddenly become feminism’s leading orator. The title track, which urges that we should ‘fall in love with whoever [we] want to’ should be a universal anthem. Written down, these words would stagnate; sung, they are animated and elevated. They resonate through the wildly eccentric and disco-infused instrumental moments of the latter half of the album. They move you as you move to wickedly funky tracks like ‘Let’s Talk About Gender Baby’ and the refreshingly off-kilter ‘Misogyny Drop Dead.’

With this standard of polemic and peculiarity, it can be said without pretense that Planningtorock will do for 2014 what Bowie did for the 1970s. You’ll never hear music the same way again.

Oliver Walkden