Sacred Paws - Strike a Match

Pitchfork 77

Not even a minute into Strike a Match—debut LP from London-to-Glasgow duo Sacred Paws—and Rachel Aggs is already bouncing back from some minor slip-up. “It’s okay, it won’t matter in a month, in a year,” she reminds herself. A few songs later, she's on the bus, just a few stops from home, cursing herself for skipping breakfast. Hunger turns to worry; worry consumes all. That’s anxiety for you: intrusive, all-consuming, and ultimately sort of mundane. If Aggs can’t shake her woes, she’s gonna do the next best thing and bring ’em to the party.

And Strike a Match, frayed nerves and all, is one hell of a shindig. At nearly every turn, the rainclouds in Aggs’ head are temporarily lifted by shots of radiance. Over blacktop-scorching, genre-darting grooves, Aggs and singer/drummer Eilidh Rogers—fellow alum of Glasgow janglers Golden Grrrls—chronicle every skinned knee and dropped ice cream cone.

A half-day’s ride on the Megabus separates Londoner Aggs and Glaswegian Eilidh Rogers. In interviews, Rogers always seems to be trying to get Aggs to move up to Scotland so they can pal around more. They are friends first, bandmates second, and that off-record tightness lights up Strike a Match—they sing with the informality of flatmates doing dishes with the radio on, crooning not really with but towards each other. Rarely do they seem to be reading off the same lyric sheet, and when they do, they favor these woozy, out-of-whack harmonies that sit rather peculiarly against the album’s dialed-in grooves.

A dozen listens in, and I’m poring over Strike a Match, attempting to work out the couple dozen lines in which Aggs and Rogers’ intersecting vocals have blotted each other out. But these loosely tethered vocals function as a kind of mental cross-check. Aggs plays the pragmatist just trying to keep her head down and make her transfer; Rogers is the intruder, that uninvited nogoodnik who pops up to remind you of everything else you're doing wrong. These exchanges really get at what living with anxiety is like: You’re just bopping along, minding your business, when all of a sudden, some past failing or future worry starts crowding out the present. Though this could easily turn to solipsism or self-pity, Aggs and Rogers mostly just try to keep things moving. The anxiety’s present and accounted for, but if they can help it, they aren’t about to let it get in the way of their good time.

Compared with Aggs’ other projects—the austerity-minded Shopping, the thrill jockeys of Trash Kit—Strike a Match is brighter, punchier, its charms a little closer to the surface. Whereas past Aggs projects felt like they’d been recorded in a rock tumbler, Strike a Match bounds out of the speakers. Producer Tony Doogan’s done wonders in burnishing Aggs’ oft-spendthrift sound without dulling its off-the-cuff impact.

Behind the kit, the looser-limbed Rogers is every bit Aggs’ equal. They urge each other on without crowding each other out, leaving each other plenty of room to finish each other’s sentences. Influences run an impressive gamut—the post-punk/new wave convergence, smartly self-lacerating twee, yelpy mid-’00s indie, Papa Wemba, you name it—but the closest analog is probably the last couple Talking Heads albums, when they’d so thoroughly absorbed all their worldly forerunners that they mostly wound up sounding just like themselves. Sacred Paws have arrived, on the back of a troubled groove: a little preoccupied, maybe, but ready to dance.