Never before has the group’s vocal interplay sounded so lush, so implausibly otherworldly, while Stella Mozgawa’s beats have grown into combustible walls of polyrhythms, meaning that this is the Warpaint’s most danceable, most tactile record to date.
‘United Crushers’ is here to debunk the notion that Poliça are doomed by their own experience with the simplest of tools – better songs.
The overall experience is simply a much more listenable one; the LP puncturing the occasionally overwhelming sense of foreboding and paranoia with one of positivity – euphoria, even – just as Flegel sings about “suicide machines” et al.
Part of the beauty of what Hval does is the way her art takes you to a place you didn’t know existed, but in a way where you don’t notice the journey.
An orchestra of influences bubble, perceptibly, into a delicious mash-up that, like any great cocktail, is stronger than the sum of its parts. Exciting and original. And proof that not quite knowing who you are is just fine.
By basing any adjustments on empirical evidence, the band have imbued this second album with a sense of vindication that ‘Silence Yourself’ lacked.
‘Puberty 2’ features all of those teenage troughs, and the confusing, thrilling peaks too – the starry eyes, manic ambition and constant distraction of sex.
I could list every track and rhyme off a whole catalogue of touchstones so let me keep this simple: ‘Light Upon The Lake’ is a beautiful thing. Its melodies are beautiful and its honesty of emotion is beautiful. Make it a part of your life.
With that enchanting inscrutability, in fact, ‘Wildflower’ feels almost like the Avalanches incarnate: curiously stoic, utterly unique, and the purveyor a weirdly dazzling trip.
With ‘Atrocity Exhibition,’ Danny Brown cements himself as a hip-hop great.
Half of ‘Varmints’ eschews vocals but with odd exception Meredith manages to cloak high-minded experimentalism in playful pop sensibility.