Some new age-y Cocteau Twins-like stroke pop from Soho Rezanjad, here. Wooaah-ha-ha-how, this is some absolutely…not my cup of tea music here. To me, at least. It fried my head, really.
This is a long slog of an album at 14 tracks in length, but does win points for its devotion to theme and decent song titles (‘Greed Wears a Disarming Face‘, ‘The Prostitute‘ and ‘Climbing on the Back of An Impulsive Child‘ – which, ironically, describes the process of what I would do to your mum before I shagged her). (WTF? – Albums Ed)
If you’re an overbearing prick who pretends to be a nice person and a spiritual ubermensch but really a frustrated middle-manager with a toxic personality who waits until flinging out time at the club to pick up disturbingly drunk women with psychological issues then you’ll probably like this.
I think if I’d lost all hope and I was in some dingy sex club at 2:20am, having a life alteringly terribly time but sitting in the corner pretending to be all Louis Theroux, while really I just wanted to be nearly seven hours into my optimum sleeping schedule, then this is the sort of musty, limp goth rave I’d expect to be soundtracking my openly hostile mutterings.
That said, Soho has an undeniable presence, and ‘December Song‘ is a really nice moment of sincerity stripped of the rest of the album’s overwroughtness.
It’s undoubtedly taking itself very seriously, despite there being not much joy to be had in Six Archetypes. As the press release has it:
…”Rezanejad sings in Farsi the Iranian national song recognised by the National Council of Resistance of Iran – a faction opposed to the country’s current Islamic Republic. Although the track can seem like an appendage to the rest of the album, I find its placement to be highly intentional. Like the expression of archetypes, identity is both defined and limitless, abstract and concretely lived out. This artist, as the daughter of first-generation Iranian immigrants, leads us out of the album’s psychic theatre with a song of national struggle and exile. We are prompted to mobilise, act on our links to the collective – be it the universal unconscious or one’s social and political body. As Rezanejad councils us in ‘The Seeker’ explorations of the psyche mean nothing if you don’t ‘mind your touch on minds.”
If you’re a bit fucked in the head you will like this album.
Six Archetypes is out now on Silicone Records.
