Tune-Yards - Sketchy

The Guardian 0

(4AD)
Themes of climate disaster, gender dysphoria and fighting privilege bubble up through a discomfiting but enjoyable sonic deluge

Tune-Yards may deal in cacophonous maximalism – ever-changing rhythms, antic, mutating vocals, drifting snippets of highly infectious melody – but you could never accuse them of mindless exuberance. The California duo’s last record, I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life, was a self-eviscerating meditation on white privilege, while 2011’s Whokill discussed both structural inequality and disordered eating. On their fifth album, gender dysphoria, abortion rights and the Larkin-esque horrors of procreation bubble up through the sonic deluge. Yet Sketchy doesn’t feel like a protest album – as the title suggests, it doesn’t have the clarity for that. That can be frustrating: Homewrecker hints at a theme of insidious gentrification, but it’s mostly indecipherable. Elsewhere, however, it allows for exhilarating ambivalence: Sometime muddles through a relatably complex response to climate disaster over a blissful lover’s rock foundation.