Album of the Week: LP1 by FKA Twigs
FKA Twigs' single, Two Weeks, is weird music - but weird in predictable, popular ways. The British singer, born Tahliah Barnett, gasps and sighs in a hermetically dreamy fashion, reminiscent of Grimes. The beats and rhythm are off kilter, and the bass hums like the chants of a mythical tribe.
FKA Twigs
Young Turks
FKA Twigs' single, Two Weeks, is weird music - but weird in predictable, popular ways. The British singer, born Tahliah Barnett, gasps and sighs in a hermetically dreamy fashion, reminiscent of Grimes. The beats and rhythm are off kilter, and the bass hums like the chants of a mythical tribe.
She's an artist with a careful image - every song she has released has been accompanied by a video. The minimal, industrial title LP1 bespeaks careful grooming. The music is the yin to The Weeknd's yang - a dismal, eerie album full of urbane depravity and longing from a woman's twilight perspective. The xx, Ciara and Kate Bush are other probable influences (and she lifts the chorus melody from Air Supply's All Out of Love on Two Weeks).
None of this is to say the album lacks heart. Barnett does a nearly perfect job of approximating the heady rush and vulnerability of love in its first days, and its accompanying terror - the silent, weightless spectre of loss. On Hours, she sings, "How would you like it if my lips touched yours and they stay close for hours till the stars went out?"
There's something sublimely paralytic about the music, as though the things FKA Twigs feels stun her. On the album's cover, she affects the sad, blank, longing gaze of a porcelain doll, imminently breakable.