Cheltenham’s Tahliah Barnett returns for a third LP edge-pushing electronica, techno and avant-pop with a self-created title fusing euphoria, ecstasy and sex to express that feeling of transcendent losing yourself in the moment. Whether that be in moments of creativity, dancing an all-nighter or an orgasm, it’s a feeling to grasp at and hope to retrieve here, or generally in life. Assisted by producer Koreless, twigs has an impressive pedigree of mainstream success combined with pioneering oddness, her songs often themed around an oozing sex drive and self-healing with an almost alien otherworldliness. The title and opening track uses her trademark mix of ethereally beautiful, high-warbled vocals, ecstatic beats and wriggly electronica. It’s strikingly different, but also recognisably twigs. Perfect Stranger has a more conventional club-pop feel, albeit with oddball sped-up of vocals, and is about falling in love with someone you know nothing about in that behavioural pattern of joining up the imagined ideal dots - “you’re a stranger so you’re perfect”, while Childlike is even more bouncy, skippy almost J-pop with snatches of Japanese joined by guest North West. Room of Fools is a infectious catchy track about transcendence on the club floor with ecstatic vocal moments that even have a dash of Kate Bush even Middle Eastern warbles – “it feels nice”. Meanwhile Keep It, Hold It contains far more strikingly odd, original sounds, a song about dealing with crisis and difficulty as it moves into dance-club energy. Drums of Death goes full robot, while Striptease feels like a dystopian sci-fi soundtrack, flitting between floating yodels and jittery drum’n’bass. As ever, strikingly different, sensual, sexual, often ecstatic, and reaching out for that evasive state. Out on Young Records / Atlantic Records.
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