Soft and Music

For Phillips “Pip” Brown, the New Zealand-born singer-songwriter known as Ladyhawke, 1985 is not merely a year: It’s a career choice. Ladyhawke — the name comes from a Matthew Broderick fantasy film released in, yep, 1985 — is a retro fetishist, slathering her songs in synthesizer fanfares and thudding drum machines that precisely evoke the mid-Eighties sound of Pat Benatar, Kim Wilde and the Top Gun soundtrack. Ladyhawke is a skillful craftswoman, and in songs like the grandiose “Magic” she whips her synths into stormy dance-floor fun. But as with so much Eighties revivalism, there is a chilly emptiness to the exercise; most of the songs feel like fashion statements. She’d have done well to heed her own advice in “Another Runaway”: “It’s too late to call back yesterday.”