I think both of them represent a return to an imagined ideal of pure pop that's seperate from what actual pop music looks like in the 2010s and today. A lot of contemporary pop music sounds over-compressed and brash, deliberately futuristic and abrasive. Lyrics about clubs and drinks and self-mythologising. Whereas Jeppo and Robyn hark back to a time when pop dealt with love and romance and a different kind of sexuality. You could picture them on a Saturday morning kids' TV show from 20 years ago in a way you couldn't picture eg Lady Gaga or Drake doing it.
Which is really sad, because
a) a lot of pop music is in really great health just now - Tove Styrke, Tove Lo, Charli XCX, Annie, Taylor Swift etc, all releasing music lately that's really good but not afforded the same broadsheet column ink
This is incisive stuff. I think you've hit on the clearest failure of Carly's work, which is that her work is out of step with the times. She's aggressively conventional about song structure. Hook, verse, big chorus, verse, bridge, chorus, etc. A lot of her process seems to be working with producers and trying different melodies she's saved up against different underlying tunes. Very different from a more production-forward workflow; you would never write "Money Machine" or even anything off "House of Balloons" like this, and it does feel like it's becoming a drag on the output.
c) Jeppo's quality control isn't there - there's some incredible stuff in her catalogue but half of E.Mo.Tion and a lot of Dedicated is anaemic, wishy-washy stuff that doesn't reach the heights of Run Away With Me or Call Me Maybe. Dedicated was a massive disappointment considering how much I loved the first two albums.
It's funny, I disagree on the case of Emotion—other than Warm Blood and Black Heart I would say it's the closest an album has come in a long time to feeling like it's comprised entirely of singles. But yes—there has been a dragging. Dedicated is "meant" to be a less catchy, more relaxed album, but I do think that's a cop-out, and the cover of a song from the popeye musical (???) is a kind of pandering to the base that disrupts the flow of the entire album. Mostly though, I feel like the issue isn't that the individual songs lack quality, it's a kind of sameyness.