Casper Clausen—Better Way

Better Way, which sees Efterklang alumnus Casper Clausen going solo for the first time, is an inoffensive collection of soft-edged indie jams which mimics its myriad influences with pride.

While it’s arguably redundant to say any post-2000 rock project has a Radiohead influence, similarities in this case are both too numerous and direct to ignore. Clausen’s soufflé-light voice is as versatile and lazily beautiful as Yorke’s—and sometimes finds itself subjected to identical delay effects. Instrumental elements regularly play parrot too. ‘Feel It Coming’ ascends into the same Warp-lite territory as the Radiohead of In Rainbows or The King of Limbs, patterned with irregular, krautrock-y percussion. Clausen’s style as a lyricist isn’t a million miles from Yorke, either. He favours imagistic or associative song subjects over a concrete narrative, and often repeats them like a chant, through which they accrue mystery and weight.

Clausen achieves moderate success with these techniques. He further elevates Better Way with some transformative production work, imaginatively incorporating some recognisable sounds. ‘Dark Heart’ features autotuned vocals which could be from a Poliça or a Travis Scott track, but places them so far in the background of its mix that they take on a fresh, whispery quality. These light touches—acousmatic drones under ‘8 Bit Human’, bubbling tape decay in ‘Little Words’—are the album’s best quality. In sheer lightness and musical understatement, Clausen has almost everybody in his genre beat. Better Way is as close as indie rock gets to ASMR.

Ultimately, the vocals are the kicker. Clausen’s voice has been compared to Bono—and by extension he sounds a little Chris Martin-y. The squeaky-clean male tenor isn’t as fashionable as it was fifteen years back, and may turn some listeners off completely. This is a shame, as Clausen is actually a very strong, tightly controlled vocalist. He brings the bashful Chris Martin of Parachutes Coldplay to mind; not the shouty-man of their new line of mum-pandering weepie anthems. Either way, he just ain’t Tom Waits.

This sounds facetious, but speaks to a larger problem. For something called Better Way, this album doesn’t strive to do much new. There is very little sense of danger. Not every album should reinvent the wheel, but most would benefit from bolder and more risky decisions. This is no exception; a little unsure of its own identity to get away with so fully incorporating others’ styles. Better Way is strongest at its most minimal—with standout tracks ‘Little Words’ and ‘Ocean Wave’ both built on quiet loops. This maybe reveals the album is at its best when it plagiarises least. Better Way is intricately crafted and compelling, but you may feel you’ve heard it a few times already.

Better Way is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Shygirl—ALIAS

For the last decade or so, pop has engaged in a masochistic relationship with its own excess. I’m sure there’s some socio-economic cause which can be argued—that post-2010 society’s ubiquitous obsession with responsibility and shame can be traced to the credit crunch, as we try to guilt-trip roofs over our heads in absolution for our past excesses. I’ll leave that all to someone cleverer than me, though.

Whatever the reason, the naïve millennial optimism of LMFAO’s ‘Party Rock’ has crumbled—first giving way to Danny Brown’s ‘Dip’, then Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Swimming Pools’, and now Billie Eilish’s ‘When the Party’s Over’ and The Weeknd’s ‘Blinding Lights’. It is now imperative for pop music, and mass culture in general, to engage in self-flagellation. Deviations from this formula are quite often dismissed as gaudy or selfish—though there are exceptions in the likes of 6ix9ine and Cardi B. If you’re sceptical, try listening to Skrillex’s ‘Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites’ now without wincing. You can’t, because you don’t really want to party anymore. You’d rather stand outside until the party’s finished, then help clean up while ‘lofi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study to’ plays.

This context makes Shygirl’s ALIAS doubly impressive. She’s a member of NUXXE, a label/collective of four like minds who buttered their bread by celebrating excess, and throwing less-than-sanitary oozy wonders of the human condition into sharp relief. ALIAS doesn’t break that mould. The seven-track EP turns its sights on sex and relationships—and seduces at the same time as making you want to get a top-up HPV jab “just in case”. It seems to admonish and admire casual sex in equal measure, elevating the act to monumental, quasi-narcotic status. Sex gratifies—but just as it turns you on, it can turn on you, and become consumptive.

Shygirl herself becomes the personification of this—a praying mantis-esque character whose self-proclaimed sexual availability and prowess feels as parodic as it does appealingly dangerous. Shygirl can “go all night” and continually asks “can we throw it down again?”. Nowhere is this GFOTY-style fulfilment of male fantasy made clearer than in ‘LENG’—a track which features the line “so wet that I drown”; a raucous escalation of the year’s biggest hit, ‘WAP’.

Despite going doubling down on the rudeness, ALIAS is ultimately far more empowering than ‘WAP’. Shygirl doesn’t indulge in Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s self-commodification or earnest vapidity in which your pussy is bartered as social currency. Behind the posturing and naughtiness is a half-ironic and deceptively sentimental release, which sneaks vulnerability and depth in behind its own boldest elements.

‘TASTY’ is an oasis of sweetness at the album’s exact midpoint; detailing the rush of optimism and confusion that heralds a new relationship. And ‘BAWDY’ double-hands strength and weakness, framing sex as an act which can crystallise and intensify our deepest feelings, permitting grander heights of emotional bliss. 2020 be damned: ALIAS has the buoyancy and joie de vivre of a Cakes Da Killa release—and it’s twice as smutty.

ALIAS is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Mica Levi—Ruff Dog

Over a decade ago, Mica Levi released Filthy Friends on MySpace—a mixtape the Observer called ‘a shortwave transmission from the year 2020’. Well, 2020 just came and went, and very little on the radio even came close to it. In the past decade, Levi’s work continued to look forward, habitually pushed its own boundaries, and garnered an Oscar nomination and Golden Globe win in the process.

Levi has always erected a cordon between their modern classical and avant-pop sensibilities. The former, award-friendly stuff, has always released under Levi’s birth name; the latter under an alias, Micachu. Ruff Dog is the clearest confluence of these two styles, and Levi’s first non-soundtrack solo LP. In the context of Levi’s career this is a significant moment, like an artistic self-shedding or actualisation. No longer the collaborator or the craftsman, Levi has seized an opportunity to leap into unfettered, uncompromised creativity.

Ruff Dog, at a slim 25 minutes, straddles every style of Levi’s career. Centrepieces of the album are shoegaze monoliths which stretch the extremities of overdrive. ‘Wings’ is as captivating as anything put out in the genre’s heyday, a mellow piece awash with slow, mesmerizing oscillations of noise. Elsewhere ‘Pain’ captures the spirit of Xinlisupreme, a brutal track which climaxes in the album’s sole moment of excess and extravagance; Levi shredding their pipes as the music collapses into ecstatic chaos.

Elsewhere, Levi gathers loosely-associative sounds into dense, dial-twiddling electronica which would’ve felt right at home on Magic Oneohtrix Point Never. ‘One Tear’ is the clearest example; a cutlet of Heart FM that someone forgot to put in the fridge, patterned with colourful but dangerous-looking blooms of mould. Little production grace notes belie precision behind these tracks’ looseness. The most overt case is ‘Chains Baggy’, which supplements its uneasy atmosphere with a cheekily-deployed iPhone alarm tone.

And it’s not all bells and whistles. ‘Cold Eyes’ and ‘Ride Till We Die’ are minimally-arranged, emotive and stripped-back sketches that feel like a fulfilment of the promise of early Liz Phair. Vocals are still obfuscated in post-processing, though. Wouldn’t want to take all the mystery out of it.

Appropriately for the last year, Ruff Dog feels quite lonely and cobbled together. You can imagine recording time being snatched between periods of restricted movement, downpours of bad news, mastering taken place in a dark bedroom. But the album soars, free from any concessions to creative partners, and benefits from the unpredictable jitteriness that made Micachu a name all those years ago.

Ruff Dog is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Yosa Peit—Phyton

Yosa Peit’s LP Phyton is one prong of her multi-disciplinary project based in Berlin. Peit corralled local artists for what she calls an ‘interspecies garden’; an installation incorporating ceramics and even costume, set to become a sound garden in 2021. This, for some, no doubt frames the LP as window-dressing for the project’s more tactile elements—the way techno becomes background noise for fashion shows. Thankfully, Phyton is a colourful, direct and inventive album which stands confidently on its own two feet.

Since long before Bjork’s Biophilia, there’s been a desire among producers to incorporate natural processes into their work; to more closely enmesh machines and biology than before. And that urge still exists. Leland Kirby simulated misfiring neurons for his generative opus Everywhere at the end of time. Venetian Snares’ and Hecate’s Nymphomatriarch is comprised entirely of samples of the two artists performing sex acts on one another. Phyton takes a more conceptual (and less gimmicky) approach by incorporating plant and organic matter into its physical spaces, and an exploration of growth and process in its sonic spaces.

This idea of growth takes many forms. Early in the album we are presented with ‘Serpentine’, a track which unfolds to reveals itself more throughout its duration. The track begins slowly, with the clamour of a forest canopy and sparse synth arpeggiations. But you soon get the sense that it has flowered from these unassuming shoots as it becomes more beat-driven and energetic. ‘Leaf I’ and ‘Leaf II’ feel like the sketches of a lost track—and as their name suggests, they feel like some incomplete piece of a larger structure from which they’ve come unstuck.

Most surprisingly, the conceptual rigor of Phyton coexists with some great pop songwriting. ‘Curls’ and ‘New Stars’ have the warm timbre and catchiness of Paul Simon’s Graceland—but, like a jpeg copied a thousand times, they boast some intricate and almost profane distortions; distortions which are beautiful in their own right. They drag their 1980s pop sensibility into a screaming present which conceptualises science far beyond the remit of what anyone though possible four decades ago.

Phyton feels utopian. It predicts a prosperous and inclusive future, in which we find harmony with nature—and ourselves—through the reconfiguration of our own structures; in which growth and construction are synonymous, and the development of culture enriches the world rather than gutting and burning it piece by piece. The great success of Phyton is to make that future convincing—and to say that everyone is invited, especially you.

Phyton is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe