Blondshell: Blondshell review – an alt-rock star is born
The relationship revenge fantasy is big business in pop this year. Miley Cyrus’s Flowers, a better-off-alone shrug at her ex-husband, is a global No 1; Shakira went viral annihilating her allegedly cheating ex; Lana Del Rey posted the sole billboard for her new album in her former boyfriend’s home town; SZA’s Kill Bill murdered her ex and his new girlfriend. Salad, from Sabrina Teitelbaum’s debut album as Blondshell, is hellbent on a different kind of vengeance. Set to wig-blowing goth-rock somewhere between the Cranberries’ angst and Depeche Mode’s shiny edges, it finds the 25-year-old songwriter imagining dispatching a man who transgressed against her friend. “God tell me why did he hurt my girl?” she sings as guitars thunder.
It’s the most overtly furious moment on an album that otherwise deals with subtler shades of rage as she turns over the complex relationship dynamics that can condition women to tolerate mistreatment. Teitelbaum previously performed as Baum, writing disaffected, feminist-slogan-T-shirt altpop that already seems dated. She has since said it never felt like her and that getting sober in 2019, followed by lockdown, pushed her to write the angry music she had always been scared to make, inspired by Hole and PJ Harvey. (A cynic could call it a savvy move – although Teitelbaum’s bloodletting has been celebrated as exceptional, the fact is that angsty young women have dominated alternative music in recent years, culminating in Boygenius signing to a major.) On Blondshell, a torrid but surprisingly fun coming-of-age album, Teitelbaum is still close enough to access the contrary emotions behind that strength of feeling, but it’s the sort of smart, vivid record that only comes from having enough distance to establish patterns of behaviour.
One constant is a destructive desire for sensation, whether from narcotics, sex or hollow validation. “I think I’m losing myself,” Teitelbaum admits on Tarmac, frustration fraying her voice as the chorus heaves with spite: “I’m in love with a feeling / Not with anyone or any real thing.” Blondshell, at any rate, transmutes that craving into enormously satisfying poppy alt-rock (produced by Yves Rothman) that freshens up well-worn influences. Teitelbaum is a fan of a Pixies-style loud-quiet-loud blast, Nirvana’s dank guitar tone, Liz Phair’s feckless delight. But she has a distinct facility for hooky melodies – often euphoric even when she’s singing about something dismal – and nuanced vocals, qualities that give her debut huge live potential. She slides from sarcastic to hangdog to hard-edged, the last a tell-tale sign of self-laceration: “Just look me in the eye when I’m about to finish … I think my kink is when you tell me that I’m pretty,” she sings with a trace of disgust at her neediness on the otherwise blissed-out Kiss City, one of a few dreamier songs that bring spaciousness and scope to this compact, ninetrack album.
Coming back to Del Rey, it’s 11 years since she released her debut, which germinated her longstanding theme as someone frequently in thrall to unpleasant men. Unsurprisingly, this landed poorly during the empowerment feminism era, though fans recognised the complex truth behind her words. So did a subsequent generation of therapised young songwriters, Teitelbaum among them, keen to figure out the roots of these warped attractions. Blondshell starts with Veronica Mars, named after the 00s US series about a teenage private investigator. It’s a vignette from a childhood spent watching age-inappropriate shows: taut palm-muted chords anchor Teitelbaum’s digressive verses, as if following the logic of a child cobbling together a worldview, and crest in a playful, ripping chorus. “Logan’s a dick,” she sings of Mars’s nemesis-slash-love interest. Then comes a quick see-saw of reactions: “I’m learning that’s hot / Gimme shelter,” she begs, the latter pointedly not a Rolling Stones reference but a plea for her just-lost innocence.
It’s the seed of a vine that only grows more tangled with age. Blondshell nails the fine line between devotion and delusion in self-destructive relationships. “What if I’m down to let this kill me?” she sings on Sepsis, slumped verses about loving some prick giving way to a thrashing, yelled chorus: “It should take a whole lot less to turn me off.” She conflates love and addiction in a grim mutter on Olympus, a song that descends into Cobainworthy disaffection: “Hate myself ’cos I always black out,” she sings, deepening her voice to hollow the final words. (Meanwhile, she gets the common contradiction of embracing oblivion while wanting better for loved ones, offering tough love to a relapsed friend on the sweet, disco ball-hazy Sober Together.)
Substance use and insecurity only add to this precariousness. The final two songs, Tarmac and the spare, celestial Dangerous, find Teitelbaum changing and overindulging to impress fickle new party friends, fully aware of the consequences. She sounds weak at the conclusion of the latter, singing in a defeated run-on about wanting escape but fearing being ditched, craving the “emotional vacation” of alcohol. “I don’t know moderation,” Teitelbaum sings. “I just know enough to know that I don’t know a thing and I want someone to take the blame.” It gets at the futility of the revenge fantasy as no substitute for healing. But Blondshell, rich with bitter experience and untrammelled honesty, offers a robust shelter where listeners might start to find it.
This week Laura listened to
Álex Anwandter – MaricotecaAnwandter is a pioneering Chilean pop star whose sharp, glamorous synthpop evokes the highs of Phoenix. Marioteca is funky, breezy, but intriguingly tortured.
• Alexis Petridis is away
a particular topic, such as love,” says Kihara. “We are collecting how people drew ‘love’ during the exhibition period, and plan to convert the collected drawings of love into a map.”
A smaller room houses two games by artist Angela Washko. One – The Game: The Game – is a darkly satirical dating game about pickup artists and their tactics, a game that shows a twisted mirror image of love through the eyes of manipulators. The other, Mother, Player, is about the artist’s experiences of pregnancy during lockdown, a diaristic multiple-choice text game illustrated through vivid handdrawn sketches. “Love and care hadn’t necessarily felt like an urgent or wellrepresented theme in the games space,” she says. “When I was pregnant in the pandemic, I started coming back to games in a very serious way, playing so much of them and starting to think about the missing perspectives of mothers and pregnant people in games – how many stories start with a dead mom, moms you never meet? I felt this urgent need to address that in some way.”
Washko’s games illustrate the festival’s sideways approach to its theme: some of the games you’ll find here are about romantic love, but most are less obvious. Nina Runa Essendrop’s roleplaying game End(less), for instance, asks players to construct the life stories of earth’s very last souls from poetic fragments; “it’s about the idea of looking back at a lifetime with a sense of love, and also being able to let it go and move on,” explains its creator. Another game, Point of Mew, casts you as a cat trying to cheer up your human with small acts of care. I really wanted to play Consentacle, a card game where you “help a tentacled alien and a curious human have a mutually satisfying romantic encounter”, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask a stranger to play it with me.
The festival’s director, Sebastian Quack, intentionally avoided a selection of exhibits that was too obvious, he says. “We wanted to avoid cliches … games can talk about love in a unique way. In film or poetry, when you’re reading about love, maybe you imagine yourself as the person speaking. But video games are systems and narratives, so you’re put into a position where you can feel a relationship, both the story and the logic of it, and maybe also the power dynamics. All the games here are doing that in different ways.”
The most interesting thing about video games, for me, is how they connect people to each other – whether they’re together in the same fantasy world, forming friendships and teaming up for quests, bonding over a shared love of gaming on social media and chat servers, or playing with or against each other in real life. Games have brought people together since the days of the arcades, but only rarely are they aboutconnection. After playing this multifarious collection of games about love in all its forms, even someone who’s been playing games for their whole life may look at them a little differently.
Now Play This is at Somerset House, London, until 9 April
Games are systems and narratives, so you can feel the story and the logic of a relationship – and the power dynamics