JANE WEAVER
Flock FIRE RECORDS
Experimentalist goes pop but can’t help bringing the sinister.
Somewhat channelling the spirits of Tom Tom Club, Goldfrapp and Norwegian electro star Annie, Jane Weaver’s 12th album is her most pop and dancefloor-orientated yet. After a healthy, inquisitive career in which the Liverpool-born singer has forayed into indie and folktronica, as well as creating the genre-defying 2014 gem The Silver Globe, this is apparently the record she always wanted to make. Happily displaying her affection for funk and synthpop, it nevertheless co-opts witty world music tropes and elements of everything from drone to dub. Any originality lies in the fusion of disparate threads, but the overriding force is route one rhythm.
IF IT’S A DISCO WE’RE INVITED TO, IT’S A COLD, NERVY, PARANOID ONE.
Oddly, however, it’s very toppy, with perfunctory bass.
So if it’s a disco at the end of the world we’re invited to, it’s a wilfully cold, nervy, paranoid one, as if we’re in a near-future deserted shopping mall, shimmering with brightness and intimidatingly clean. At times the beat might be something Michael Rother would work some clipped guitar over, while other bubbling spells will have people lazily namechecking Giorgio Moroder when in fact they mean
Cliff Martinez. And every time you begin to feel this could be Dua Lipa or Kylie, a brief warping of the sounds nudges everything closer to Tame Impala, and the influential shift in emphases they negotiated on 2015’s Currents. It’s possible to reshape a well-known Pet Shop Boys lyric and call this Spacemen 3 with a disco beat.
‘Let’s escape, you and me,’ she sings on catchy closer Solarised, ‘and return to a time that’s more real’. And while the album wants to find a cheery innocence, the numbing, distancing effect of our locked-down world breaks in all over. This is no bad thing: the record’s more interesting and less generic for its fretting crackle and hiss. The Revolution Of Super Visions, the highlight track, is a cheeky, squeaky, tribute to Parliament-Funkadelic, or a psalm to Prince, which for all its following those sacred maps owns its idiosyncratic phrasing and patterns. Heartlow plays out behind a veiling wash of mist in the manner of dreampop shoegazers Lush or Ride. Again, it’s the unpredictable mix of all these usually miles apart elements that keeps things physical, not clinical. Modern Reputation whirrs and stings curiously; Flock itself is somehow both floaty and busy, culminating in what sounds like a barrage of flutes.
If this is Studio 54, it’s been refurbished by the guys who did The Overlook Hotel in The Shining. Creepy, insistently a little bit off, and plenty of fun, it’s a fascinating take on dancing while the world burns.