Squeeze Me

The follow-up to the eclectic, style-ingesting Monsters, Sophia Kennedy’s third album Squeeze Me adopts a relatively straightforward, catchy indie electro-pop -- at least musically. Lyrically, however, it constantly searches for meanings, hidden and not-so-hidden, behind the words and actions of others and circumstances in general; the title Squeeze Me was intended to represent both a desired embrace and an act of violence. Despite featuring simpler arrangements, it still has Kennedy’s characteristic spontaneity and whimsicality, opening with tribal-type drums and what sound like synthetic monkey screeches. That track, “Nose for a Mountain,” takes a small child’s view of a parent, and can’t think of family and friends without thinking of eventually being alone. It’s followed by the dance-encouraging “Imaginary Friend,” which gets lost in the facades of dreams, memories, expectations, and social media personas (“I got lost inside a world that isn’t real and now is broken down”). Later, tactile lines like “Climbing up the sticky walls/I swim in lemonade” inhabit “Runner,” whose animated synth bass is accompanied by sirens and other sound effects, murky synth timbres, and glimmering mallet percussion, and the funky, skittery “Rodeo” questions where this is all headed amid layered processed and affected voices. All of her questions seem to culminate with the penultimate track, “Closing Time,” a more theatrical piano song with lyrics such as, “Everything keeps spinning/The end has no beginning/The bottom is the ceiling/Everything’s upside-down.” That song ends in a collapse of distorted noise, as if an ending were impossible to see. The actual closer, “Hot Match,” takes on a driving post-punk/dance-rock and employs engine-revving, tire-burning effects for a song that seems to find everything combusting. (Kennedy has called the latter her first rock & roll song.) While Squeeze Me digs deep into the unsettling, the paranoid, and the absurd, its dark, sleek surfaces and angular melodies are beguiling even in the face of unanswered questions. ~ Marcy Donelson

米ボルチモア出身、ドイツ在住のアーティストによるニュー・アルバム。ミニマルなビートに語りのような歌を乗せる手法がヤング・マーブル・ジャイアンツ的な"Drive The Lorry"など、70年代後半から80年代前半のポスト・パンクを想起させる音が多い。共依存がテーマの"Feed Me"を筆頭に、思慮深さが滲む歌詞は知的興奮をもたらしてくれる。
bounce (C)近藤真弥