The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Girlwoman, Aya, Hard Feelings, Hana Vu, Curtis Harding: Abgehört

2021-11-05T17:13:17.632Z


The East Westphalian province can also be intoxicating when the electro-pop newcomer Girlwoman haunts through exposed aggregate concrete abysses at night. Their neon-colored debut »The big whole« is our album of the week.


Enlarge image

Musician girlwoman

Photo: Lea Braeuer / State Act

Album of the week:

Enlarge image

Album cover of "The big picture"

Maybe you should go to Bielefeld after all. Yes, no, the joke about whether the city in Ostwestfalen-Lippe really exists, let's leave it too old, too worn out. Blumfeld mastermind Jochen Distelmeyer comes from Bielefeld, as does singer-songwriter legend Hannes Wader, that should be enough as a manifestation of a place that is not unimportant for German pop. Girlwoman is also from Bielefeld, her real name is Axana, is a young musician and singer - and, together with her producer and husband Rasmus Exner, she recorded a gorgeous debut album, a somnambulistic journey through a neon night that explores the last things in life ends with the "big picture".

Already a year ago, Girlwoman drew attention to herself with her first single »Rote Riesen Don't Sleep«, a minimalist electro track with a hissing beat and jingling synth-piano will-o'-the-wisps. The apparently badly hungover singer mumbles in a scratched voice that she roams the world sleepless and longs for drugs and salvation - or death? "Just a little white pill, it's my last will, not forever, just for tonight so I can sleep," she sings. An ambivalent, suicidal rave, as one might have expected from trap rapper Hayiti, not from an indie pop newcomer, well. Bielefeld.

But even there, big-city abysses are revealed. In »Prisma«, the first track on the album, another emo rave, the protagonist loses herself between gray house facades, while a play of colors rages inside her: »It's so easy to get lost in my forest of fluorescent tubes«, she sings with adulation . The neon light is addictive and "your skin tastes of cement" - licking the psychedelic has not been described in a more charming way for a long time. »The night keeps what it promises«, says the next song, now a shoving, zeitgeistically apocalyptic electro-hit: »Look around, everything is torn / take my hand, we're going now«.

"I'm looking for a home in things themselves," says Girlwoman about her collection of songs that she created over the course of three years, which points to mental unhousing, at least to loneliness and a longing for invigorating impulses, crackling defibrillator flashes in a repellent, washed-concrete-gray environment. "My heart stopped, on the slab path behind the house," she sings in a beautiful heartbreak ballad. In »Strom Linie Form« and »Monochrom«, which stagger between trap rap, goth pop and cool new wave with guitars, beats and synth strings, she struggles neo-existentially with dissolution. “Have courage,” she whispers to her shadow in the song of the same name, he's just waiting to eat her up: “If I fall, there's no impact, everything stays as it is,” she sings. Pop has always served toto absorb these sinking feelings; Here a young artist forces her feelings of stagnation and inner numbness into weightless, restless urban music in order to escape the pull of a fatal lethargy. The eighties, from time to time also pop vampire Falco, greet from the crypt.

As influences, Girlwoman names current electronic role models like the Dirty Projectors, Anohni or Moderat, but also songwriters like Herman van Veen. If it weren't for her obvious talent as a songwriter, one could find modern drama ballads that are making their way into the charts such as “Plattenweg”, “Fata Morgana” or “Tomorrow is different” unbearably cheesy. Her dreamy puzzling nature, however, repeatedly fills the lines of text with a macabre, self-abusive humor, which in turn points to the rap genre in terms of flow. "I'm a power ranger, fight my way through, keep getting stranger", she sings shortly before the end in the (not seriously meant) Pink Floyd homage "Anybody Out There" and wistfully says goodbye to love: "Nothing holds me hostage in his child's hands «.

In addition, heavy, fading synthetic drums thunder, horror film synthesizers waft through night and fog ... the right soundtrack for this woman with a knife-edge through Bielefeld City with the "tick-tack trauma", looking for the one lost with too much brooding and grief Time.

On the whole very convincing.

(8.4)

Listened briefly:

Aya - "In the Hole"

Some of the noises on the exhausting, but also very exhilarating debut of the British DJ and experimental musician Aya sound like small steel nails or bones in one of these yellow Minions plastic containers from the OB eggs rhythmically clicking around - or playing pinball brutally with them. It is therefore not a matter of course that you can dance to tracks like »tailwind«, because they are actually just loose, hard and shrill splintering noise and sound collages, the Aya drunkenly shivering or with strict Anne Clark chanting and the most minimal Beat support to a claustrophobia narrative connects - in the elevator with a twitching neon strobe, "somewhere between the 8th and 9th floor". That raises doubts whether it is really "whole" after this sonic catharsis,as the album title suggests - or deeper in the hole than ever before. In any case, one of the most exciting electronic albums of the year. (8.0)

Hard Feelings - "Hard Feelings"

In the very funny video for "Sister Infinity", the silty producer dude Joe Goddard (Hot Chip) is frustrated looking for a vocalist and finds the plus-size diva Amy Douglas from New York, who is notorious in house circles, on the Internet. Medium once dubbed “professional bad influence”.

The result is an entire album full of porn, self-deprecating, nostalgic disco tunes that should bring tears to both Róisín Murphy and Kylie Minogue's eyes.

Kinky.

(7.9)

Hana Vu - "Public Storage"

How good that cover artwork no longer plays a major role in the age of streaming, because you don't want to see the look into an unsavory throat on the debut of the young, US-Asian singer Hana Vu, reminiscent of disgust warning images on cigarette packets.

But it goes well with Vu's punk attitude, who lets her uprooted life between stored household and teenage fear flow into gripping, melancholy shoegaze hymns with synth-pop-coldness and 80's guitar noise.

Indie rock heroine for Generation Z. (7.7)

Curtis Harding - "If Words Were Flowers"

His retro charm and his eternal comparisons with the other, legendary Curtis (Mayfield), Harding can not get rid of his third album, but producer Danger Mouse.

It helped the US singer to breakthrough, but also pasted his sound identity in the usual manner.

Freed from this, Harding now again embraces the luxurious soul groove of the seventies and his gospel roots, likes to wear the funky bootsy glasses and also allows psychedelic rock experiments.

There is still something going on, we said on the last album.

Here it is!

(7.5)

Source: spiegel

All life articles on 2021-11-05

You may like

Trends 24h

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.