Liked http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/katy-perry-143 (pitchfork.com)

Like Witness, 143 is a spectacular flop, but it’s a strange one—like one of those restaurants that looks nice and has an expensive menu but serves food so mid as to be insulting. It’s worse than awful. At least awful is something you can direct your rage at, deriving catharsis in the process. Aside from some fleeting hellacious decisions, like the jump scare of a warbling child’s voice that opens the cloying final track “Wonder,” 143 is mostly just…there. The flop cycle is a hard thing to get out of. For one thing, popularity begets popularity. Absent that kind of momentum, a dimmed star needs a once-in-a-career single like “We Belong Together” or “What’s Love Got to Do With It” to shake her from her funk. 143 has no such undeniable classic. So now what? Consider what occurs to one’s sense of self when universal praise dries up—that kind of identity-dissolution is woven into 143 ’s chintzy fabric. One day you’re ablaze, burning yourself into corneas the world over. Then you’re just a smoky outline of what you once were. And then you’ve disappeared entirely. Just like a firework.

Katy Perry: 143 by Rich Juzwiak

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