Jessy Lanza - Oh No
Tiny Mix Tapes 80
Jessy Lanza
Oh No
[Hyperdub; 2016]
Rating: 4/5
Soft beneath the threshold of perceptibility, I am bigger than a body. This is an affirmation I repeat daily until I convince myself with certainty of its truth. My features are dull, of this I am aware; yet still I swell with hope at the thought of my potential, at the limitless possibility in knowing that all these little stupid things like working in a Times Square Applebee’s or walking dogs for three and a half years will finally pay off, finally filing neatly into fodder for the most dazzling bio you’ve ever seen. It’s a liminal casket, a spectral point-of-entry mapped across a three-year-old brand-anxiety matrix, but someone’s gotta do it. The space between Deleuze and Delusion is paper thin, but in its potential, we continue. There is no other way.
In the protracted trajectory of retromania, we’ve long since obliterated binaries between analog and digital, romantic and authentic, hypnagogic and quixotic and self-aggrandizing POWER POWER POWER in pop to the point that any attempt forward is inconsistent with a narrative already stretched past its logical end, eating itself in a “Critical Ouroboros” — but even that is really pretty uninteresting. Is there anything after Carly Rae? Where the pieces fit together all romantic- and indulgent-like without false claims to represent “The Underground” only till it’s in one’s interest to scale? Is there anything more than a mildly-famous creative lower class, committed to a hackneyed ethos of artistic integrity, now firmly subservient to tech in all contemporaneity? Was it ever any different in Dianna Ross’s day? Ruth White’s?
Jessy Lanza’s Oh No is, on the surface, a hybrid of two sounds: the anthemic “Odyssey pop” of Junior Boys’ albums like Big Black Coat and the dizzying frenzy of footwork, aging nicely from Lanza’s earlier You Never Show Your Love EP with TEKLIFE members DJ Spinn and Taso. Although the blend changes slightly from track to track, the template, roughly speaking, is always: Melodic Synthwork and Hyper-Quantized 909 Retrodrum from Junior Boys’ Jeremy Greenspan (who co-produced the release) plus Quick Tempo and Polyrhythms equals Oh No’s entropic “Sound.” Eased together with Lanza’s velvety, effervescent vocals, the tracks bounce from banger to ballad in an viscous spectrum between sounds, snowballing into something big.
From this scaffolding, a new platform of performative pop is born. Lanza’s voice, breathy and evocative, channels pop theatrics of generations of singers, from 80s ballads in Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, and Eurythmics to 90s R&B from Aaliyah, Jade, and Destiny’s Child. Through moments of production restraint, Lanza hits incredible vocal heights with an undeniable skill for crafting melodies that collapse distinctions between gesture. Blanketed in delays that blur intelligibility, “I Talk BB” hits with thick piano chords and the chorus, “Cuz when you’re face to face, you don’t know what to love.” It’s heavy and heartbreaking, romantic and theatric and ambivalent — a gorgeous, reflective surface that all the best, most universal pop is built on, now draped over stunning production that feels surreal. “Going Somewhere” similarly works icy synths in congruence with coy vocal resound, spinning silky verses over rattling arpeggiation in a wild composite of beloved synthpop and gorgeous, crooning desire. The more “footwork-leaning” “It Means I Love You” flips a driving 160 kick into five minutes of velvety R&B, christened with a rush of pitched samples and searing hi-hats. It’s footwork by some definitions, but more largely, it’s indicative of certain sounds moving toward the pop world. Like DJ Paypal’s Sold Out or Violet Systems’ House of Style EP, it’s the sound of the underground in motion, collapsing in on itself again, a joyous, envious, celebratory collapse all the same.
Wrapped in a overwhelming number of influences, Oh No vaults across an infinity of cultural milieus to find itself. Soft and sensual, alone in a room of millions, Lanza weaves past and present, dance and desire as one in a dizzying, strenuous aesthletic attempt at its future. Planted on the balcony, pushing out from a penthouse view, Oh No stands alone in last gesture. In dance, in heartbreak, in triumph and desire as one, some things never change. I’d say this is one of those things.
01. New Ogi
02. VV Violence
03. Never Enough
04. I Talk BB
05. Going Somewhere
06. It Means I Love You
07. Viviva
08. Oh No
09. Begins
10. Could Be U
The Guardian 80
(Hyperdub)
When Canada’s Jessy Lanza debuted with 2013’s Pull My Hair Back, she was pigeonholed as one of the “future R&B” artists mixing up 90s sounds with new electronics. Understandably, she and co-producer/partner Jeremy Greenspan have made a run for it on second album Oh No and a wider – and weirder – range of influences, from Yellow Magic Orchestra and J-pop to Chicago footwork and New Orleans bounce, shine through their wonky pop prism. Lanza’s smoky sensuality is still there on slow jams such as Begins, Could Be You and I Talk BB, which recalls one of Prince’s syrupiest piano moments. But much of it is, brilliantly, like something from a dusty Dance Mania tape, recognisable only by Lanza’s distinct, vapour-light voice. At times, the production can be overly fussy (see Going Somewhere), but tracks such as VV Violence (squelchy electro-funk by way of girlish electroclash) and Never Enough (a nod to smooth house dude Morgan Geist) demonstrate their ability to team that experimentalism with peak-time danceability. There could be a bona fide pop star in Jessy Lanza yet.
Continue reading... Fri May 27 00:00:00 GMT 2016Pitchfork 79
In the last year, in and around Hamilton, Ontario, billboards have been posted around roads warning residents about the danger of the carcinogenic element radon in their homes. The billboard showed a hellish crack in the ground oozing a toxic green light. Jessy Lanza started seeing these advertisements right around the time she moved into her co-producer Jeremy Greenspan’s (of Junior Boys) home to write her sophomore album Oh No. She was also convinced right around the same time, that the air quality in their shared home was poisonous. In order to fight the incoming entropy, she surrounded herself with tropical plants to clean the air, and she completed an album that recycled the bad voodoo into something remarkably generative and self-assured.
She told the FADER that in general she’s “always thinking of ways to alleviate waking up every day and feeling a deep sense of dread.” Oh No in its own way is about harnessing anxiety and estrangement—imagining how all of her bundles of pent-up nervous energy could be harnessed into a productive flow. The music here is what happens when you turn that faucet on and let all the power just stream out. Oh No is a gorgeous and deadly pop music manifesto that proves yet again the sad girls are not vulnerable and silent subjects. Or as Lindsay Zoladz once wrote, music in this mode is not exactly “sadness” but an expression of a “particular kind of strength—one that allows the contradictions, complexity, and emotional range of a lived experience.”
In the last three years since her debut, Pull My Hair Back, it's obvious by just listening to this album that both her singing and production efforts have matured exponentially. The songs are freewheeling collages of '90s R&B, Chicago footwork, acid house, disco, and wonky minimalist pop, using simple instrumentation to span multiple moods and BPMs. Meanwhile, Lanza’s singing works overtime, lifting boulders and throwing them across city blocks. Her lyrics are blunt and straightforward, but her singing allows her to imbue even the most casual and static of statements with a sense of devastating irony. For example in “Going Somewhere” she treats pandering and all its silent erosion with subtle shifts in phrasing, hiccuping in the middle of lines like “Say you love me” and “Baby I just want to impress you" as if she was almost giggling at the thought.
The exhortations of hurt in Lanza’s songs are not coming from the perspective of someone sulking over their wounds, but a place of triumphant reclamation. The production and her singing on this album reach full symmetry in the album’s centerpiece, “It Means I Love You.” It’s a frenetic blend of footwork surrounding a supine ballad of loss. It tastefully samples a tabla beat from a South African song, and swaddles this percussion in slashing synths. Her voice carries along with the instrumentation in a deathly shadow dance, mimicking its jerky changes in tempo and pitch effortlessly. It all stops just for a moment when she tells the listener, and the beloved, to look into her eyes, because that's when you it means she loves you. In that pocket of seconds, it feels like you’ve been turned into stone.
Fri May 27 00:00:00 GMT 2016The Guardian 60
(Hyperdub)
Jessy Lanza’s remarkable 2013 album Pull My Hair Back debuted a strange and thrilling sound nestled between afterhours and peak time, a sort of post-pubstep, blossoming intermittently into beauty. While that album saw the Canadian singer-writer’s voice float, untethered, from the pin-sharp production, her follow-up seems brasher, more memorable yet less substantial, lacking the eeriness that made her last work so compelling. Melodramatic Moroder power ballad I Talk BB, the twitching Vivica and a joyous title track build on her early promise, but too often Lanza’s free-form 80s pop can’t quite yoke its desire to challenge to an ability to entertain.
Continue reading... Fri May 27 00:00:00 GMT 2016