Tahliah Barnett's full-length album is an award contender.
There's so much writhing, it's enough to make you seasick. And that's before you get to the gloved hands, naked bodies, faux choking and S&M undertones. The first many of us saw of "this Twigs girl" was last year's incredibly raunchy, extremely NSFW video for Papi Pacify, a song that
announced the arrival of a confident, controversial and utterly unusual new talent.
As her videos and artwork show, Tahliah Barnett knows how to create a sexualised storm around her music. But any thoughts she was promoting style over substance were banished with recent single Two Weeks, a song-of-the-year candidate that hammers home an illicit romance so explicitly almost every line is unrepeatable. That it came with a perfectly paired Cleopatra-themed video seemed like a bonus.
Barnett's first full-length album, the follow-up to two scene-setting EPs, proves she has the kind of adventurous sonics and forward-thinking nous to back up her R18 visions. LP1 combines the woozy basement sub-bass of The xx with Bjork's off-kilter rhyme schemes, Portishead's industrial-strength grind and some seriously skewed pop sensibilities to craft a focused and original sound that almost deserves its own genre. Banshee-hop, anyone?
Whatever you call it, Barnett's riveting debut plays like a mirror image to The Weeknd's grumpy dream making. Numbers combines woozy bass stabs, rising synths and ghosty howls -- "Was I just a number to you?" wails Barnett -- to craft a danceably bonkers highlight. Likewise, Lights On's desperate plea of "Never leave me" sends shivers down the spine, and Video Girl's twitchy beat and wailing vocals come across like an eerie warning call from another world.
So it's telling that nothing is as it seems here. Songs that start one way often end up somewhere completely different. Preface's beautiful chamber chants are interrupted by disgustingly grimy grunts. Pendulum starts with a clattering beat that never settles and adds layers of bass and vocals until its overwhelming conclusion. And Hours comes with a slurred industrial stomp with a throbbing finale reminiscent of a Nine Inch Nails remix.
