This posthumous and final album by the extraordinary, innovative, experimental electro-pop and trans artist Sophie Xeon, who tragically died in 2021, is here finished by co-producer Benny Long and with a huge cast of guest vocalists, but also leaves the question of how much more there could have been. After breakthrough singles Bipp (2013) and Lemonade (2014) and later 2018’s Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides felt so compellingly different as a breakthrough in electro-pop that Sophie forever feels like the sound of the future, but since that fatal fall in Athens, is now, weirdly, in the past. It’s a disconcerting, uncomfortable feeling of unfulfilled promise, with glimpses of much more across this substantial collection of 16 tracks at over an hour long. Sophie’s strengths were always in the oddness, in new sonic ground, so perhaps the best way to approach this album, which feels more like a compilation of ideas and sounds with guest vocalists than an album as such, is to dig deep in the crate for strangeness and disquieting newness. There are many variously finished, shimmering pop numbers here, are are something of a mixed bag. The best of these is perhaps includes Exhilarate with Bibi Bourelly, with whom Sophie apparently had a fun creative relationship, or the dreamier Always And Forever with the breathier Hannah Diamond. Yet it always feels more rewarding to look for the odder material, less dominated by vocalists, and where Sophie’s production and creativity more prominently comes the fore. So on second, trappy track Rawwwww, it’s the dark synth sounds and beat more interesting than the distorted vocals of Rozzy, and then same goes on Plunging Asymptote (with spoken voice of Juliana Huxtable), which contains some truly bizarre sounds and beats, or the bizare clicky-tumble sounds on Do You Wanna Be Alive? to the dark sci-fi feel of The Dome’s Protection (with Nina Kraviz). The same principle repeats across many tracks, perhaps sometimes better left as instrumentals, or kept with minimal spoken narrative of vocalisations, as in the latter. Listening to the sounds, not the various voices, is the way to truly appreciate this artist and to pay tribute to them.
Arguably then, the most fun, clubby, strange, deep, dark and experimental comes in the sequence starting with the bubble-bursting sounds of Elegance (with Popstar), the evocative beeps, squeaks and burbles of underground clubbing in Berlin Nightmare (with Evita Manji), the restless Gallop (again with Manji), or the dark, distant almost underwater rave sounds of One More Time (with Popstar), in all of which there’s a tangibly different place. Opener Intro (The Full Horror) is indeed a disturbing, challenging beginning, a bit like something from Angelo Badalamenti’s soundtrack to Twin Peaks, an ambience with distant animal sound, and in the light of this being a valediction to Sophie’s memory, is an appropriate place to start - challenging, strange, and tragic, indicating what are going to miss from one of the most interesting British electro-pop talents of the last decade. Out on Future Classic / Transgressive Records.
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