Proof that ‘weird’ has a place in pop
Rae Morris Heaven London
Rae Morris harbours a not-sosecret desire to be one of pop music’s heavyweights. You can hear it on every vast hook and swaggering beat of her new album,
Someone Out There. She’s evolved beyond the wonky piano ballads of her 2015 debut, Unguarded, dunking her sound in synths and cramming it with weird, catchy choruses. But somehow, in commercial terms, it hasn’t worked. On its release last month the album peaked at No 20, and the singles failed to chart at all.
Watch her live and it becomes all the more mystifying that Morris is not sitting alongside artists such as Dua Lipa and Charli XCX at the top of the pop ladder. On Wednesday Morris played a neat, punchy set with a vigour that laid bare her ambitions. Opening with the rumbling Push Me To My
Limit, she let loose her peculiar voice – mellow and tight-throated, with a lurching, almost androgynous falsetto – before getting down to the business of big, reckless pop songs.
The album’s lead single, Do It, is a brazen come-on, written with (and about) Morris’s partner Fryars: “We could write another duet, or instead babe, we could just do it, do it, do it…” Live, the infectious chorus prickled with playful flirtation. Cold, from Morris’s debut album, proved another highlight, thanks to the presence of her drummer, Geordan Reidcampbell, with whom she shared an intriguing chemistry.
Both to her credit and her detriment, Morris’s influences are easy to glean. Though she’s from Blackpool, she echoes both the strange intonation of Björk and, sometimes, her melodies. Occasionally these influences sit too heavily but for the most part, she takes them and soars. There is a place for weird in pop these days, and it is galling that Morris hasn’t found the place there that she deserves.
Though from Blackpool, she echoes the strange intonation of Björk and, sometimes, her melodies