Come Back Down by Total Wife
'Come Back Down' by Total Wife
Some experiments in pop music are accidental, such as the brief squall of guitar feedback that opens the Beatles’ 1964 single “I Feel Fine.” Some experiments are more deliberate, such as the construction, from fragments of Total Wife’s own past, the Nashville-based duo’s latest LP, Come Back Down.
The circumstances of the experiment were economic: Luna Kupper sold her synthesizers to pay the rent before she and her artistic partner, primary singer and lyricist Ash Richter, began creating this music. To get around the lack of equipment, Kupper and Richter sampled their previous work to reuse, retool, and reconfigure it.
Because of that process, Come Back Down carries background hiss, as if parts of a master tape have been distorted by erasure and overdubbing; it also sporadically sounds as if other parts of the tape have been warped by exposure to humidity and heat. The overall effect is a syrupy, oddly pleasurable wooziness.
With canny employment of fuzzed-out guitars and hollowed-out drumbeats, Total Wife accesses another kind of pleasurable wooziness, associated with the swirling noise of 1980s and 1990s alternative-rock bands from My Bloody Valentine to Lush.
Through the haze, Richter can sound dreamy a la one of Lush’s frontwomen, Emma Anderson; she and Kupper can also resemble Suzanne Vega at her most whispery or Fiona Apple at her most distant. They persistently sound like intelligent young artists delving into themselves to locate their emotions.
And sometimes, as dictated by the limitations of sampling and fragments, Total Wife comes across as glitchy, as on the confrontational electronic slam of “Ofersi3” [sic], or hypnotized, as on the somnolent, buzzing march of “Chloe.”
More often, Total Wife churns through melodic loudness like “Peaches,” which could pass for a remix of a Cranberries B-side, or “Make It Last,” which ends Come Back Down in a cascade of feedback. It feels cleansing. And fine.
|
|
Buy Come Back Down on Amazon here.
Paid link
