Franz Kafka wrote about animals so much: a monstrous bug, a younger panther in a menagerie, a mouse named Josephine who desires to wow you along with her tune, a canine who sees a robust triumvirate of different canine levitating and has some ideas about it. He wrote about these creatures in prose that’s defamiliarized, exhausting, wickedly humorous. The Russian composer Ekaterina Shilonosova, who performs as Kate NV, shares the same sensibility with the Austro-Hungarian author: On her glorious fourth file, WOW, there’s a suite of animals, and he or she is each rigorous and kooky about them.
On WOW, NV abandons the marginally extra legible songs of 2020’s Room for the Moon, and the cohesiveness of 2018’s для FOR, opting as a substitute for delightfully fractured inscrutability. WOW is dense and hyper-saturated with chintzy synths, subject recordings, and closely manipulated vocals. Name it maximalism; name it pop music for individuals who occur to get pleasure from each Karlheinz Stockhausen and Lisa Frank. It exists in a zone that NV has been working in for some time, one which entails fermenting and reimagining every thing from Japanese metropolis pop to the ECM New Sequence to corny ’80s chart-toppers. Opener “oni (they),” which options Japanese-language lyrics written by Foodman, appears like being inside a pinball machine: Every flicker of synth lights up brilliantly, bouncing erratically from level A to B.
Every tune is its personal absurd room. Like earlier data, WOW makes good use of Discovered Sound Nation’s Damaged Orchestra pattern pack, sourced from broken devices from Philadelphia’s public faculties. On “confessions on the dinner desk,” there are synths that sound like they’re guffawing or yawning, subject recordings of a door opening, the sound of clinking dishes. Violin and clarinet burst in on the midpoint. It is sort of a meals struggle, rendered within the aesthetics of Věra Chytilová’s Daisies, the place two ladies in flower crowns stomp round on a desk ingesting brandy and throwing cake at one another, fucking with everybody they meet.
However NV’s music isn’t twee. Simply because one thing is cute doesn’t imply it’s not rigorous, and her playfulness has a goal: In upsetting expectations, it’s meant to maintain you in your toes. Her songs are slanted, indirect. “razmishlenie (considering)” builds in such a means that you simply’d suppose it will finally depressurize, but it doesn’t; it stays on the identical stage of depth for the tune’s period. There’s no payoff, however not in a means that’s essentially disappointing. Her music could be a exercise; its self-containment might be nearly alienating.
Maybe that’s as a result of there’s not essentially a story. You couldn’t say that WOW is about something. As an alternative, it’s outlined by its aesthetic cohesion, a lovely sense of formal seriousness that holds court docket over the file’s surrealistic menagerie.
All merchandise featured on Pitchfork are independently chosen by our editors. Nonetheless, whenever you purchase one thing by means of our retail hyperlinks, we could earn an affiliate fee.
#Kate #WOW #Album #Evaluate
![](https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/6422f84919801b52b557f3a4/16:9/w_1280,c_limit/Punter-%20ST%2012".jpeg)
