New Track: In 'Cellophane' FKA Twigs Drops The Pretences And Everything Else
Tristan Young @talltristan
It’s been 5 years since FKA Twigs released LP1, and while its impact seemed seismic at the time, she has kept a relatively low profile since. With the announcement of a coming tour and the release of new music, get ready to see and hear a lot more from her. With her new single ‘Cellophane’, Twigs drops all the ominous glitch electronica and down tempo IDM to focus singularly on her own voice. The result is an artist at her most disarmingly raw and vulnerable. Despite the risks of such an unadorned concept, she seems confident in her appetite for theatrics and experimentation. Save for a sparsely trickled offering of classical piano, there is almost nothing to mask her thoughts, rather she reveals her self as an exposed nerve. Twigs’ voice has an intrinsic elegance and grace, as rendered readily apparent in lines like, “they want to see us, want to see us apart”. Her ethereal cadence is almost forcibly empathetic, but it’s when she toys around with her register and annunciations that the track becomes truly striking. Twigs digs her voice into a gulch of lower octaves at the beginning of the phrase “and I just want to feel you there, and I don’t want to have to share our love”. The way she elongates and contorts her delivery of certain words in the lyric as she climbs upward, twisting them into abstract- even ugly- forms is mesmerizing. She releases just a hint of degraded groans as the stress of her vocal contractions add a splash of friction to the otherwise silken delivery. When she repeats the lines, this time with a pristine and unapproachable design, the words take on a new demission. A mythos grows around these sentiments as she carries them through writhing vocal derangement into a purified sonic environment. For a brief moment in ‘Cellophane’, Twigs’ own multiplex voice conveys more complexity, unease, and splendour than she ever had with a sequencer or drum machine. One wonders if she’ll ever go back.