FKA twigs is making a new kind of feel-good music
One of the more rare and delightful magic tricks in music goes ta-da anytime a virtuoso convinces us that they're just messing around. It's a sort of playtime precision that you don't really notice until the music thoroughly settles inside your head, leaving you to wonder why your face hurts (from smiling) or your body feels sore (from dancing). Think of Eddie Van Halen and Chet Atkins horsing around on the fretboard, or Young Thug rapping in helium hi-def, or Janet Jackson punctuating an immaculate melody with laughter.
FKA twigs is pretty much there on “Caprisongs,” a new album that feels lighter and tighter than anything the British singer has ever applied her voice to. Those soprano exhalations used to hang over her older, more solemn music like meticulous sighs, but here, she's doing double-Dutch jumps in the direction of the exosphere. The rhythms are brisk, and the mood is up. It's as if she's found a way out of her psyche and into the real world — which is how a lot of us want to feel right now.
That's the central illusion of “Caprisongs,” though. We're having big fun, but the artist is at work. “I've got voices in my head,” twigs sings on “Meta Angel,” describing a cluttered brainspace while fastidiously teasing out those voices in multi-tracked, multi-timbral stripes of melody. She knows how to sing in Windex squeaks, teapot puffs, lullaby staccato and more. Apply Auto-Tune to any of the above, and the uncanny valley starts to resemble a dance floor.
On “Tears In the Club,” she's braving that dance floor, trying to evict an ex-flame from more than just her head. “I wanna get you out of my hips, my thighs, my hair, my eyes, my late-night cries,” she sings in the first verse, her phrasing as taut as ever, but her articulation going ever-so-slack, inviting the album's twin themes of desire and self-improvement to do a little reconciliation dance.
“Careless” is all desire, a quiet-stormy duet with Daniel Caesar that opens with twigs delivering a cute doo-doo-doo harmony as if she were a cyborg girl group feigning the sound of muted trumpets. It sounds so cool and playful, but the closer you listen, it's painstaking, too. Then come the drums and the song's opening line: “My heart dissolves away to the rhythm of you.”
FKA twigs seems especially attuned to rhythm throughout “Caprisongs.” She understands the power it has to drag our heads out of the past by making our bodies engage the present. And when she goes hopscotching across these accelerated pitter-patterns — spacious drill beats, buoyant dancehall beats, fluttery Björk-ish beats, polymorphed beats of unknown provenance — she makes the world seem broad with possibility. This is right-now music. It feels good to be here.