ADMIRAL GREY - ENJOYMENT

 

 

Helene Cixous (Stigmata) - "I want the world of pulses, before destiny, I want the prenatal and anonymous night."

 Goethe (The Sorrows of Young Werther) - "... we treat them as our subjects, these children who are our equals and whom we ought to consider as models."  

 

If Lydia Lunch can describe American songwriter/musician/performance artist/polymath extraordinaire Admiral Grey as the 'anti-Karen O', her 2019 solo debut Enjoyment might be the anti-Fetch the Bolt Cutters. Fiona Apple's celebrated prediction of feminine constraint, both pandemic and domestic in nature, took five years to create. Enjoyment is a compilation of tracks conceived and executed over a decade (some date back to her first no wave-adjacent group Drayton Sawyer Gang, 2002-2007), and released a year before Apple's opus. It describes a similar psychic terrain of interlaced trauma, dream and apotheosis. Bandcamp classifies it as noise wave, but its musical surfaces are too pretty for such a corral. Perhaps noise pop is a better description for the stylistic liminal zone where AG resides on this release. 

Scuttlebutt is about that she's a warbler. We'll have none of it. Kate Miller-Heidke warbles, Ms. Grey soars. Earlier AG musical projects like Ecstatics and Enjoyment could be marketed as dark/cold/synthwave; the whole punk/post-punk brigade from Poly Styrene to Siouxsie Sioux seems to emanate from her voice in Glass Lamborghini. 

As a performance artist, she explores identity in ways that can be bracingly deconstructive or celebratory. Glamorously feral live with her band Cellular Chaos, like Amy Taylor channeling Tomata du Plenty: a livewire cocktail of fearless abandon and Brechtian distance. The video for ‘Horror’ depicts her as one of Rimbaud’s ghoul queens. A classically-trained vocal flexibility allows for enhanced aural spectra hostage. P. J. Harvey sounds impressively Patti Smith-like on ‘Good Fortune’, as capable of combining stridency and euphony. Saint Grey’s (fem)imagery is legionary. 

Opener 'Naturally Naïve' combines bittersweet pop of a Bacharach-Warwick vintage with the baroque pop tradition of artists like Julia Holter or Virginia Astley. It's air of boldness and independence suggests Bjork, Grimes or even the musical-theatre-mixed-with-classical features of In Camera-era Peter Hammill. For all its pastel colouring, ‘Naturally Naïve’ is as much a howl for estrangement as ‘Faintheart and the Sermon’. St. Grey substitutes Bacharach’s primary chordal blocks for pH’s Brucknerian gloom, but the music is similarly circumvoluted around lyrical cadence. 

'Pray, Don't Pray' recalls anti-religious songs like Hammill's 'The Lie' or David Ackles' 'His Name is Andrew'. AG replaces those songwriters' Cold War-era predeterminate nihilism with contemporary neuroplastic promise. The lyrics of 'Song 4' depict a childhood state of dissociation captured as a way of life prior to its institutional classification as malady. Its sequenced synth arpeggios describe a stately architecture that could be Versailles or the dream corridors of Marienbad. 

Admiral Grey's Promethean style suggests avant-pop's most adventurous femme fantastiques: Joni Mitchell, Dagmar Krause, Kate Bush, (perhaps a little of Nina Hagen, who's referenced on 'We Quit Our Jobs', or Danielle Dax). Marnie Stern's vertiginous swoops gleam before the neo-exotica vista of ‘Jewel Box’ like Yma Sumac performing a belly dance. There’s a Julee Cruise-era Lynchian wooziness to the harmonies on ‘Lydia’s Song’, while ‘Tropical Depression Lorena’ taps into the Zolo energy of Sparks or early Split Enz. Hauntology doesn’t always have to sound haunted.

Enjoyment is a fine compilation (concept collection?) for a more neurodiverse age, and a gentle rallying cry for those of us who feel like we’re never going to climb out of others’ uncanny valleys. Rise as ye lions, or as heirs of nothing. 

(C) 2021 Jon Kromka

https://admiralsaintgrey.bandcamp.com/album/e-n-j-o-y-m-e-n-t