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Singer Arlo Parks
Photo: Alex Waespi
Album of the Week:
Arlo Parks – »My Soft Machine«
"At the moment, it doesn't feel like everything around me is exploding," British singer Arlo Parks said in an interview with SPIEGEL at the beginning of 2021. At that time, however, she already knew that celebrities like Billie Eilish and Michelle Obama were among her fans. A few months later, she won several Brit Awards, later the prestigious Mercury Prize for her debut album »Collapsed In Sunbeams«, which in the meantime had become a kind of comforting soundtrack for the post-pandemic hangover of youth with comforting songs like »Black Dog« or »Too Good«. And then the events around parks really started to explode. During the Corona period, the newcomer was hardly able to perform live. In the summer of 2022, she suddenly stood on the giant stage of the Glastonbury Festival as a celebrated pop star and mood sonar of her generation. One appointment followed the next, one performance the other.
The collapse in the bright spotlight followed promptly: In September last year, she broke off her US tour on the grounds of acute burnout: her mental health had "degenerated into a paralyzing state," she said at the time. In the meantime, the musician, who was born Anaïs Oluwatoyin Estelle Marinho in West London in 2000, had moved to Los Angeles, where she lives most of the time with her friend, punk rapper Ashnikko. Now she returned to London to her family to regain her strength.
The music on their second album tells of the consequences of this excessive demands. »My Soft Machine« is her own body, which is imbued with euphoric endorphins by her newfound love, but still carries around the cracks of recent times – a vulnerable machine that doesn't run smoothly. So the mood is more depressed, the sound more synthetic, an acoustic image of the plastic reality of her adopted home.
Instead of the warm soul and analogue folk of role models such as Nick Drake or Elliott Smith, the electronic hyperpop of British dance personalities such as Joy Orbison or John Glacier was now the inspiration, Parks recently told the »Guardian«. The new album was produced by US pop specialists such as Ariel Rechtshaid (Haim) and Buddy Ross (Frank Ocean). It's a sound that seems more muscular and mature, but also cooler, that dares to experiment and beat, sometimes loudly grabs space with guitars like the nineties indie rock homage »Devotion«.
The majority of the new songs, however, which are diary-like as usual, flow along melancholic and slightly dazed. The cheerfulness that has blown through Parks' songs so far, despite all the depth and tragedy of the lyrics, seems to have evaporated. Pop hooks, such as in the glittering »Pegasus« (with Parks' good friend Phoebe Bridgers), are now rarer, some even drone in the mainstream monotony (»Dog Rose«). But that doesn't mean songwriter Parks is any less sparkling. »Purple Phase« and »Room (Red Wings)« once again take up their role as mindfulness angels from their debut, they are about girlfriends who have come too close to the drug abyss and need to be rescued.
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Arlo Parks
My Soft Machine
Label: Rough Trade
Label: Rough Trade
approx. 17,99 €
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Parks are fragile, but also strengthened by their own crises. At the beginning of the album, in the beautiful »Bruiseless«, she still longs for the innocence of childhood: »I just wish I was seven and blameless«, but then wisely accepts the Gen-Z blues in »Hurt Forever« that she and her age cohort are just scared kids who somehow have to cope with all the grief: »I know some things don't get easier/ I know some things hurt forever«.
Parks is always at her strongest when she intersperses celebrity and brand names (Wim Wenders and Juliette Binoche, Mugler sunglasses and Cadillac Esclade) into her anecdotal texts – not as a checker pose, but to make them seem more realistic. Her descriptions are vivid when she describes an unpleasant relationship scene on the way to a diner in »I'm Sorry«: »Petrol in the air, wisteria and scrambled eggs« – you can literally smell and taste it.
The song, one of the best on the album, is about how much the protagonist, in this case Parks herself, suffers from not being able to open up to the other person: It's easier to be blunt, she sings, while constantly apologizing that it's hard to trust someone, that's what she's working on incessantly: "Tried to tell my therapist everything, tried to meditate, fuck the pain away, tried to move out to L.A., dye my hair lime, be a saint," she lists her catharsis odyssey in a kind of rap song, "but I won't peek through the blinds I've shut in myself and so nothing changed."
A timid blink into the light through the half-closed blinds of the mind, that's a nice image for the sound of this record, which finds a special tension between nervousness and numbness, paralysis and departure – and story plots that read like scenes from an emo soap on Netflix. For the time being, Arlo Parks remains on the trail of itself and the zeitgeist. (7.7)
Briefly listened to:
Bar Italia – »Tracey Denim«
Not much is known about the London trio with the flirtatious pulp-pointing name Bar Italia, but one suspects that Jezmi Tarik Fehmi, Sam Fenton and Nina Cristante primarily wear existentialist black and probably listened to the same eighties and nineties records as, see above, Arlo Parks. Among other things, the cracking »Friends«, reminiscent of Pixies and Breeders, speaks for this. Others reproduce the fears and frustrations of Slowdive, Pavement, a bit of New Order ("Clark") and lots and lots of The Cure, with competently updated laconicism and grumpiness. In a culturally meaningful way, Germanisms (»dot«) and ironic art echoes are played with (Tracey Denim = Tracey Emin). They could have called themselves "Bauhaus" if others hadn't thought of it much earlier. So it's a feast for pop critics and other crate diggers – and for younger people who don't feel like having the originals playlisted on Spotify. Compared to the band's early singles and first albums, the pale neo-new wave sound of the debut on the well-known Matador label is now almost as clear, precise and noise-free as it once was with the Young Marble Giants. New and state-of-the-art, on the other hand, are the alternating, i.e. grassroots chants of the three members in almost every song, which in turn is reminiscent of The xx. Self-talk in the indie karaoke bar. (7.2)
Mandy, Indiana – »I've Seen A Way«
Another new band with an equally misleading name shows how to set the nervous tension of the current time to music with more modern means: Mandy, Indiana do not come from the USA, but three parts from the Manchester club scene and one part, singer Valentine Caulfield, from Paris. Together, they ignite a kind of post-punk techno on their debut album with rugged guitars and agonizing, MRT-like sequencer sounds and cacophonous passages of the most beautiful refusal of harmony. A sense of art and contemporary Germanophilia is present: An early single was called »Berlin«, not only the rubber fetish groove of »Peach Fuzz« bows to the German electro pioneers DAF – and according to their own statement, Mandy, Indiana likes to be inspired by French arthouse cinema extremists like Leo Carax and Gaspar Noé. » "Sensitivity Training" is not a mindfulness exercise here, but a brutal of noise, to which Caulfield orders Anne Clark in French to listen to the clacking of boots on the hard asphalt. The »Iron Maiden« is similarly pain-prone with nerve-piercing feedback loops and a lot of moaning, »Injury Detail« enjoys a parade of baking pipes with relish bouncing: left, right... and dance the Mussolini. Rising fascism, homophobia, sexism and the climate crisis are the subject of many lyrics to this largely experimental industrial music, which, however, always offers a supportive rhythm walker when it seems unbearable. It's also about the solidarity of the progressives in the common suffering of the reactionary zeitgeist: Always remember that there are more of us than of them, it says at the end of the last track »2 Stripe«, before a dystopian shuffling beat over grinding subway track noises points to the future. A way out? Maybe even from the lack of pop ideas of that time. (8.3)
Paul Simon – »Seven Psalms«
Job already knew that divine care can be both a blessing and a test. Songwriter grandee Paul Simon, 81, recently experienced whisperings from apparently higher places during several restless nights, which meant to him in a dream to write seven psalms. The result, however, has less to do with the pious etudes of the same name that Nick Cave published last year. Rather, it is an incomparably more amusing and self-deprecating reflection on faith, the afterlife and the last things to the complexly plucked folk guitar, based on the biblical psalms of King David. Simon, the prankster, updates many a line. For example, in the course of the round half hour, which is to be listened to in one go, it is said with a view to current crises: "The Covid virus is the Lord/ The Lord is the ocean rising". Later, in recognition of the fact that Simon's decades of work in the divine vineyard were mostly done in the recording studio: "The Lord is my record producer". The price of such blasphemies? Simon stated that he had lost parts of his hearing in his left ear during the sessions for »Seven Psalms«, which really doesn't come across as loud, but rather reminds of the »Sounds of Silence«. So he will no longer perform his psalms live, but may he be allowed a quieter sleep after this often touching meditation on approaching death. "I'm not ready," Simon sings with gentle defiance shortly before the end of his remarks, "my hand is steady/ My mind is still clear." A musician of this caliber just doesn't let the producer mess with the craft. (7.5)
Matthew Herbert x London Contemporary Ochestra – »The Horse«
The British composer and experimental musician Matthew Herbert is a kind of acoustic "nose to tail" exploiter. In the past, he created his sounds with parts of human bodies or set the life cycle of a pig to music, and for his new project he chose the body and skeleton of a complete horse. However, »The Horse«, recorded with the always daring London Contemporary Orchestra and some well-known guests, is not a provocative slaughter feast, but a fascinating tribute to the organic musical instrument from prehistoric times to the present day: bones and tendons have always served as sound bodies or rhythm tools. The approximately 80-minute session begins with caveman clatter and flute in »The Horse's Bones Are in a Cave« in a correspondingly archaic way. Subsequently, the horsehair is pulled and the horse's skin is stretched, bones are converted into percussion and wind instruments, the pelvis into a lyre. In between, the horse is quiet, is groomed and put under water. For a short time, it's also about »The Rider (Not the Horse)« and, very funny, the truck that follows the horses ("The Truck That Follows The Horses"). And just before the end, when the orchestra and bones fall into a stormy techno gallop, the horse also gets a voice (well, not really). Beastly good. (8.0)