Spectreview: FKA twigs – MAGDALENE

-PEARL-

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Like Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone, Madonna, Beyoncé and Björk before her, Tahliah Barnett (who creates art under FKA twigs) brings a hot knife to pop’s flesh and redraws new boundaries, but also does so with as sharp an eye on what it means to be female in a patriarchal world. Experiencing her work (especially after MAGDALENE, her latest LP), it’s easy to connect those spheres of influence: she writes with an incisiveness that recalls Simone’s pioneering breakdown of America’s racial flowchart (and Mitchell’s subsequent breakdown of gender politics), her deft dance work mirrors Madonna’s weaponizing of the feminine body in pop music, and her high-concept music videos feel like grittier interpretations of Björk’s revolutionary visual works. Tying these skills together is her ability to couple those high-concept ideas with emotional capacity, an ability that saw its pinnacle (so far) in 2015’s unfathomably accomplished M3LL155X. For someone who still somehow operates under the mainstream, Barnett has spent her entire artistic career capitalizing the A while doing so in physical, sonic and intellectual terms. So what’s left?

If the resounding success of her new record is any proof, all that twigs needed to do – the hardest thing any artist can do – was to dive deep into the kinds of tender territory that she’s only before flirted with, in LP1’s “Two Weeks” and EP1’s “Water Me”. MAGDALENE is all raw nerve and emotional nudity with only the slightest, most necessary flourishes of her signature industrial grindings. Every period of silence is gilded rather than chromed; delicate, purposeful ripples replace whiplash panning and sudden blasts of noise. On the surface, you could cynically deduce a commercially-intended shift to the kinds of parasitic weak-pulsed pop that plagues streaming services, and while one could feasibly imagine some to these tracks wedged in between the likes of Post Malone and The Chainsmokers, it’s nowhere near a discredit to the music presented here. MAGDALENE may be the most accessible project she’s put out yet, but it’s what she does with that accessibility that’s so marvelous. For a record so preoccupied with personal pain, its focus on modernity and listenability makes sure we know twigs is keeping herself open to our own.

It’s not just us though: Barnett’s more willing to accept collaborators into her world as well. From experimental electronic artist Daniel Lopatin (on “daybed”) to once-maligned dubstepper Skrillex (on the Kate Bush-like “sad day”) to trendy man-of-the-hour Jack Antonoff and patron saint of this decade’s hip-hop Future (on “holy terrain”), MAGDALENE’s stuffed to the brim with recognizable names. Nicolas Jaar is the great overseer, his fingers gracing almost every track here. Perhaps there’s a slight diluting effect across the board, most notably in the relative facelessness of “holy terrain”, but the territory is still unmistakably twigs’. And despite how many people have touched this record, the sonic consistency isn’t at all affected, and nothing sticks out at all as an egregious tip of the hand (or the ego). While “sad day” may be a touch repetitive, it’s nowhere near the noxious techno blast it could have been; “daybed,” meanwhile, builds gracefully from Lopatin’s hard-cut rising synths to cavernous strings, a companion piece of sorts to Björk’s “Unravel”. It’s remarkable that, for a notorious auteur, so much of this album is in the hands of other well-known producers, and yet no semblance of vision feels sacrificed. And in accepting help when she can get it, twigs allows herself an opportunity to focus on what defines this record from anything she’s done before.

Physicality has long been a significant part of Barnett’s oeuvre ever since she gained a reputation as a one-take-wonder backup dancer, and on MAGDALENE she makes that physicality the linchpin, to blinding effect. That intoxicating soprano, more unadorned than ever, finally finds itself the main course of the solemn hymnal prelude of “thousand eyes” and the self-immolating lucidities of “mirrored heart”. There’s the same presence, the same technicality, but a newfound force surfaces as if twigs is throwing herself headfirst into her performances. “home with you” starts in rap and ends in desperate refrain while remaining dynamically turbulent throughout, the vocal equivalent of a gun fired underwater. When potential Yeezus outtake “fallen alien” drops out in the chorus, you can hear the internal torture playing out in real time, not only in her sharp breaths and choked high notes but in the unconventionality of the melody itself. And of course, there’s show-stopping closer “cellophane,” a revelatory vocal masterclass that, if justice were consistent, would launch twigs to national stardom similarly (in octave-jumping fashion) to Sia’s “Chandelier.” People have speculated that her devastating words are meant for a certain high-cheekboned vampire-interpreter, but to narrow the subject to quotidian terms robs the track of its greater message. In today’s highly visible life updates, we are her, just as susceptible to public breakups (and breakdowns) as twigs. It’s the greatest magic trick performed here: just as she does throughout, she writes OF herself but FOR us, creating a feedback loop that, if channeled, multiplies the album’s formidable sense of pathos.

“cellophane’s” accompanying video, which finds twigs performing a purgatorial pole-dancing routine, is also MAGDALENE’s Rosetta Stone. Besides a testament to Barnett’s work ethic (she apparently spent an entire year learning the pole from the ground up in preparation for this one shoot), the act itself functions as a nexus for a whole host of boomerang statements on myriad social philosophies, not the least of which are the fallibility of the male gaze, the resulting denigration of women, and the fact that this denigration stretches all the back to Jesus’ alleged lover (which ties back to the criminally misunderstood female artists that Barnett pulls from). Yet it’s more than cerebral masturbation. As twigs twists effortlessly on her golden column, she’s so much at once: ironclad and intensely vulnerable, physically strong yet internally fragile, a magnet that’s simultaneously attracting and repulsing. All of this is conveyable in real time, and the realization is jaw-dropping. It’s the mark of a great artist, to not only have the capacity to birth such a concept but to contain the confidence and industriousness needed to carry that idea to fruition. Sure, a few debilitating fibroid tumors and a host of racist death threats might get in the way, but as we’re soon learning about FKA twigs, there’s not much left that could kill her quest for artistic transcendence.

Highly recommended for faux cunnilingus.