★★★★★
It's always tricky when top-40 pop stars incorporate "what they really listen to" into their music. For glitter queen Ke$ha, this means not only adopting a hard-drinkin', hard-screwin' classic rock attitude, as she did on her debut, but also lifting her no-guitars ban, with help from the Black Keys' Patrick Carney, the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne and the Strokes' Julian Casablancas and Fabrizio Moretti. Wisely, Ke$ha's producers ditch the grab-bag approach in favour of coherency...
- nowtoronto.com
2013-04-02
★★★★★
Ya gotta hand it to Kesha Sebert. The artist known as Ke$ha doesn't look like a traditional pop star nor naturally sound like one. But she's still successful. How? By shrewdly marketing herself as part garbage-chic party animal and part color-by-numbers pop star. The omnipresent Dr. Luke signed Ke$ha to his label when she was 18. He states he thought she was "unique." OK...
- www.ink19.com
2013-04-02
★★★★★
Since her last album proper, 2010's Animal, lurid chart-pop siren Kesha has been behaving oddly - befriending Iggy Pop and Alice Cooper; giving blood to the Flaming Lips. A little grit has rubbed off. Dirty Love is a roustabout rock tune, featuring an amusing intercession from Iggy, while Supernatural essays a little tokenistic dubstep. Really, though, her graceless output remains unaffected. Mostly overseen by Max Martin and Dr Luke, Warrior is dance-pop-by-numbers, inflected with guitar...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2012-12-08
★★★★★
On Ke$ha's second full-length, the pop star-lightning rod has again enlisted the aid of multiple producers and songwriters per track in a Hollywood script-doctor approach to music that's either the death knell of "authenticity" or business as usual, depending on your cultural exasperation level.
In some cases it doesn't work; the title track sounds like three separate songs grafted together: an up-tempo rapped verse laid over a tautly wound bass line slams into an ascendant, slower chorus and...
- bostonglobe.com
2012-12-06
★★★★★
As a colleague of mine recently noted, you have to be really smart to make music this dumb. Ke$ha has become incredibly ubiquitous in an extremely short amount of time, everything about her screaming "manufactured pop diva" but a surprisingly small amount of these criticisms actually holding water (or in her case, whiskey). As easy as it is for people to mock her hedonistic sorority-girl party jams (and it is incredibly easy--and fun, to boot...
- www.popmatters.com
2012-12-04
★★★★★
Revert, if you will, to your 14-year-old female self. If you're a guy, dig deep into your imagination until your brain is a blank slate and you can understand the rush of crushing on One Direction. Your parents are fighting, your brother's a dork, the popular girls at school roll their eyes at you, the curriculum is a drag. You're ready to bust loose and get out into the world, shed the drama and expectations, live life and have some fun. But you're trapped in your bedroom for four more years...
- www.latimes.com
2012-12-04
★★★★★
Kesha's latest album is "Warrior." (Yu Tsai, RCA Records ) Revert, if you will, to your 14-year-old female self. If you're a guy, dig deep into your imagination until your brain is a blank slate and you can understand the rush of crushing on One Direction. Your parents are fighting, your brother's a dork, the popular girls at school roll their eyes at you, the curriculum is a drag...
- articles.latimes.com
2012-12-04
★★★★★
Ke$ha was born to be a rock star. She's a disco queen who dresses like Axl Rose and overdoses on personality like the New York Dolls. She rules pop radio with her megasleaze boombox beats, junk-shop rags and bleached-Sabbath hair. We all know glitter girls who dress like Ke$ha, talk like Ke$ha, party like Ke$ha and slap the world around like Ke$ha. But it's insanely rare to see one of these parking-lot queens roll with the big-league pop stars...
- www.rollingstone.com
2012-12-04