Recensie
The London singer embraces the darkness on her quiet and ominous full-length debut—it’s one of the most breathtakingly beautiful albums of the year.
Even on her debut EP, at just 22 years old, feeo sounded like the weariest of old souls. She sang of a choking fear, of bombs falling like tears, of staying up to hear her lover leave because she couldn’t bear the thought of waking up to “haunted sheets.” Over toe-scuffing downtempo beats and wistfully unfurled synths, she asked questions—“Are we in love or is it just the drugs, babe?”; “Being lost is a bit like being free, isn’t it?”—in a tone that suggested she harbored few illusions about the answers.
It wasn’t just the wise-beyond-her-years lyrics that were so striking. It was feeo’s effortless balance of plaintiveness and composure, vulnerability and control. Her guarded, whisper-soft musings had a way of unexpectedly blossoming into R&B-schooled runs that proved that, for all her seeming reticence, this woman could really sing. Her tempos may have followed the halting pulse of a doubtful heart, but her voice telegraphed a quiet, determined confidence.
In the four years since, the artist born Theodora Laird has released a handful of EPs and singles, as well as collaborations with Caius Williams and Loraine James, fleshing out the bruised contours of her emotional world while burrowing deeper into the strangeness of her production. Composed of muted synths, thin tendrils of guitar, and atmospheric electronic processing, her sound atomized, turning granular and shimmery. A thin layer of dust seemed to cover everything, like a house that’s been locked up for years. Sometimes, her backing tracks were made of little more than tiny samples of her wordless voice, like a chorus of forlorn bumblebees.
On her debut album, Goodness, feeo returns with an even more experimental approach, befitting her new home on London’s adventurous AD 93 label. Her songs have gotten still quieter and more minimalist, even as her lyrical and conceptual horizons have ballooned outward. And while her voice remains as stunning as ever, some of the surface-level prettiness of her previous work has burned off, leaving a whiff of charred metal and plastic.
From the opening “Days pt. 1,” it sounds like feeo has has only grown more world-weary in recent years. “Awful things happen every day to people who don’t deserve it,” intones an ominous voice (veteran British actor Trevor Laird, feeo’s father), spinning a surrealistic tale of pianos falling onto the heads “of infinite strangers, in infinite cities, in infinite parallel universes,” photos of the dead “lost in house fires and floods, or auctioned off in plastic boxes salvaged from bailiff removals and abandoned storage units.” This grimly cartoonish, weirdly quotidian scene of existential annihilation is made all the more menacing by its backdrop of blackened feedback, like Pan Sonic in an industrial furnace; the absence of feeo’s singing voice only drives home the sense that we are entering some kind of cosmic void.
“Days pt. 1” is a head fake of sorts, because Goodness is not exactly a noise record; like feeo’s previous work, it foregrounds the emotive power of her voice and her understated melodic instincts—often, by stripping everything around her down to the bare minimum, as though she were hunched over a desk dusted with pencil shavings and eraser crumbs. Despite—or, more likely, because of—their fragility and aching sense of lack, these are the most breathtakingly beautiful songs she’s recorded yet. In “Requiem,” her multi-tracked voice rolls like luminous mist over softly tumbling synths and horns, the mood filled with nameless yearning; in “Win!,” electrical crackle snags in haphazard loops beneath singing caught on the edge between words and sighs.
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While feeo still sings about love, she has broadened her scope. “The Mountain,” a brooding tone poem suffused in billowing wind, or perhaps the sound of a rushing train, seems to be about a whale of Biblical proportions, “Her slate tailbone/Jagged and slick/Her ribcage curved and giant… She could tear me to pieces,” she marvels. “Give life/Give life/Then take it away/I’m only a witness.” In “Requiem,” she paints a similarly mythic scene of death and rebirth, black roses growing from her supine body, before a coda that feels like a benediction: “Night forgives those/Black as her.”
“Here” is the album’s centerpiece, a miniature epic of desperate hope. The seven-minute song faintly recalls Grouper in its dalliance between harmonium drone and tentative electric guitar, but the artfulness with which feeo inscribes her sadness on the surface of the air has more in common with Beth Orton and Beth Gibbons. The here of each stanza is London, a wasteland of crushing jobs and crushed hopes, dead time and dead eyes, where the minutes are counted “like lost loose change.” feeo has a gift for focusing on the tiniest details and also for zooming out and connecting everything in one graceful sweep. Begging her lover to leave the city with her (“I say it all the time,” she repeats, ruefully), she allows herself a glimpse of an idyllic future, “Laid to rest in tall grass/When we are withered and old,” before returning to reality: “But now we stay/Striking the pavement for gold.”
Toward the end of the record, Trevor Laird’s gravelly voice reappears on “Days pt. 2,” which flips the fatalistic scenario of “Days pt. 1” on its head. This time, it’s good things that happen to bad people: A villainous abuser of animals finds a pound coin on the sidewalk; “infinite landlords receive infinite loving kisses from infinite wives in infinite parallel universes.” Static swirls and rumbles, and hammering kickdrums evoke paranoia and panic attacks. Both interstitials are so unlike the rest of the album that I’ve wondered just what purpose they are meant to serve. Whatever feeo may mean by them, they’re a reminder that while her music can be bleak and it can be beautiful, it is also shot through with an acerbic sense of humor. Drawing lines between coins on the pavement and cosmic injustice, feeo’s songs can be dizzying in their shifts in perspective, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.
They can also be dizzying in their pure, unalloyed beauty, like the closing “There Is No I,” a love song pairing feeo’s highest, breathiest singing with keening slide guitar. “When we’re together/We’re better together,” she repeats reverently, in a love song that illuminates the record’s overwhelming darkness like a simple beam of light. After an album of convoluted electronic experiments and sleight-of-hand production tricks, this practically unplugged recording—unvarnished, unguarded—reveals new depth to her boundless vision. It’s the sound of an old soul renewing herself every time she presses the record button.
(Source: Pitchfork)
Even on her debut EP, at just 22 years old, feeo sounded like the weariest of old souls. She sang of a choking fear, of bombs falling like tears, of staying up to hear her lover leave because she couldn’t bear the thought of waking up to “haunted sheets.” Over toe-scuffing downtempo beats and wistfully unfurled synths, she asked questions—“Are we in love or is it just the drugs, babe?”; “Being lost is a bit like being free, isn’t it?”—in a tone that suggested she harbored few illusions about the answers.
It wasn’t just the wise-beyond-her-years lyrics that were so striking. It was feeo’s effortless balance of plaintiveness and composure, vulnerability and control. Her guarded, whisper-soft musings had a way of unexpectedly blossoming into R&B-schooled runs that proved that, for all her seeming reticence, this woman could really sing. Her tempos may have followed the halting pulse of a doubtful heart, but her voice telegraphed a quiet, determined confidence.
In the four years since, the artist born Theodora Laird has released a handful of EPs and singles, as well as collaborations with Caius Williams and Loraine James, fleshing out the bruised contours of her emotional world while burrowing deeper into the strangeness of her production. Composed of muted synths, thin tendrils of guitar, and atmospheric electronic processing, her sound atomized, turning granular and shimmery. A thin layer of dust seemed to cover everything, like a house that’s been locked up for years. Sometimes, her backing tracks were made of little more than tiny samples of her wordless voice, like a chorus of forlorn bumblebees.
On her debut album, Goodness, feeo returns with an even more experimental approach, befitting her new home on London’s adventurous AD 93 label. Her songs have gotten still quieter and more minimalist, even as her lyrical and conceptual horizons have ballooned outward. And while her voice remains as stunning as ever, some of the surface-level prettiness of her previous work has burned off, leaving a whiff of charred metal and plastic.
From the opening “Days pt. 1,” it sounds like feeo has has only grown more world-weary in recent years. “Awful things happen every day to people who don’t deserve it,” intones an ominous voice (veteran British actor Trevor Laird, feeo’s father), spinning a surrealistic tale of pianos falling onto the heads “of infinite strangers, in infinite cities, in infinite parallel universes,” photos of the dead “lost in house fires and floods, or auctioned off in plastic boxes salvaged from bailiff removals and abandoned storage units.” This grimly cartoonish, weirdly quotidian scene of existential annihilation is made all the more menacing by its backdrop of blackened feedback, like Pan Sonic in an industrial furnace; the absence of feeo’s singing voice only drives home the sense that we are entering some kind of cosmic void.
“Days pt. 1” is a head fake of sorts, because Goodness is not exactly a noise record; like feeo’s previous work, it foregrounds the emotive power of her voice and her understated melodic instincts—often, by stripping everything around her down to the bare minimum, as though she were hunched over a desk dusted with pencil shavings and eraser crumbs. Despite—or, more likely, because of—their fragility and aching sense of lack, these are the most breathtakingly beautiful songs she’s recorded yet. In “Requiem,” her multi-tracked voice rolls like luminous mist over softly tumbling synths and horns, the mood filled with nameless yearning; in “Win!,” electrical crackle snags in haphazard loops beneath singing caught on the edge between words and sighs.
By signing up, you agree to our user agreement (including class action waiver and arbitration provisions), and acknowledge our privacy policy.
While feeo still sings about love, she has broadened her scope. “The Mountain,” a brooding tone poem suffused in billowing wind, or perhaps the sound of a rushing train, seems to be about a whale of Biblical proportions, “Her slate tailbone/Jagged and slick/Her ribcage curved and giant… She could tear me to pieces,” she marvels. “Give life/Give life/Then take it away/I’m only a witness.” In “Requiem,” she paints a similarly mythic scene of death and rebirth, black roses growing from her supine body, before a coda that feels like a benediction: “Night forgives those/Black as her.”
“Here” is the album’s centerpiece, a miniature epic of desperate hope. The seven-minute song faintly recalls Grouper in its dalliance between harmonium drone and tentative electric guitar, but the artfulness with which feeo inscribes her sadness on the surface of the air has more in common with Beth Orton and Beth Gibbons. The here of each stanza is London, a wasteland of crushing jobs and crushed hopes, dead time and dead eyes, where the minutes are counted “like lost loose change.” feeo has a gift for focusing on the tiniest details and also for zooming out and connecting everything in one graceful sweep. Begging her lover to leave the city with her (“I say it all the time,” she repeats, ruefully), she allows herself a glimpse of an idyllic future, “Laid to rest in tall grass/When we are withered and old,” before returning to reality: “But now we stay/Striking the pavement for gold.”
Toward the end of the record, Trevor Laird’s gravelly voice reappears on “Days pt. 2,” which flips the fatalistic scenario of “Days pt. 1” on its head. This time, it’s good things that happen to bad people: A villainous abuser of animals finds a pound coin on the sidewalk; “infinite landlords receive infinite loving kisses from infinite wives in infinite parallel universes.” Static swirls and rumbles, and hammering kickdrums evoke paranoia and panic attacks. Both interstitials are so unlike the rest of the album that I’ve wondered just what purpose they are meant to serve. Whatever feeo may mean by them, they’re a reminder that while her music can be bleak and it can be beautiful, it is also shot through with an acerbic sense of humor. Drawing lines between coins on the pavement and cosmic injustice, feeo’s songs can be dizzying in their shifts in perspective, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.
They can also be dizzying in their pure, unalloyed beauty, like the closing “There Is No I,” a love song pairing feeo’s highest, breathiest singing with keening slide guitar. “When we’re together/We’re better together,” she repeats reverently, in a love song that illuminates the record’s overwhelming darkness like a simple beam of light. After an album of convoluted electronic experiments and sleight-of-hand production tricks, this practically unplugged recording—unvarnished, unguarded—reveals new depth to her boundless vision. It’s the sound of an old soul renewing herself every time she presses the record button.
(Source: Pitchfork)
