Album of the Week: Magdalene — FKA Twigs
Making headway on A$AP Rocky’s ‘Fukk Sleep’ and taking part in the all-star line up of Tyler, The Creator’s Camp Flog Gnaw Festival, FKA Twigs already has an impressive resume. Does her latest album do the hype justice?
FKA Twigs made a splash with her 2014 debut LP1 — a collection of satisfyingly left-field, well-produced alternative RnB cuts that showcased Twigs’ unique voice in a variety of different ways. The musical landscape, however, has changed a great deal since the release of her debut. In this context, her latest effort, Magdalene, is a litmus test of whether her musical style is still as vital and as compelling now as it was in 2014.
Certainly, this album is a well-constructed, enjoyable listen. The songs exhibit an icy sense of confusion and uncertainty that feels hard to pin down, but just right for the cold and rainy Saturday morning on which I first experienced it. The lyrics are often direct and vulnerable — the sense of misunderstanding in the chorus of ‘Home with You’ (“I didn’t know that you were lonely/ If you had just told me I’d have been home with you”) is strikingly singular. ‘Sad Day’ offers a similar sense of thwarted impulses. The song seems to portray two minds, both attempting to connect, yet failing to misunderstand one another. I love the YouTube thumbnail, showing Twigs poking her head halfway round a door. You keep expecting it to move and turn into a video, a declaration of intent. Instead, like the song, it stays still.
In an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, Twigs discussed the underlying themes of the album, including the manipulation of the “Virgin whore” archetype, institutional sexism, and the overall narrative of return home from a club night. This is marked by the final track, ‘Cellophane’, which features a more traditional, acoustic feel. Comparing this track to ‘Home With You’ offers an enigmatic narrative arc that is beautifully presented.
The production is tasteful too. The ambience and vocal snippets on ‘Daybed’ are gorgeous and, throughout the album, there is a satisfying contrast between moments of raw, reverberant vocals and more processed, distorted textures. ‘Holy Terrain’ even makes a decent stab at incorporating rapid-fire trap rhythms into the mix. The way Twigs’ voice skirts around them is reminiscent of James Blake’s experimentation with similar styles and she executes them as well as he does. There’s something liberating about using more extended melodies in the context these kinds of grooves. The plasticity of the production and sampling again creates the feeling that the song is deliberately holding back and the way the Future’s autotuned ad-libs are mixed in contrasts with this nicely.
In a way, though, I do wish the album’s restraint was not its only defining characteristic. The visuals on the cover and many passages in the songs seem to gesture toward the transhumanist AI-powered vocal manipulation of Holly Herndon or the synthetic, globular mayhem of SOPHIE. Those artists, however, manage to be both more visceral and more radically experimental than Twigs does here. Outside of certain more outré production choices, the influences of art-pop icons such as Bjork and Kate Bush figure very heavily. There’s nothing wrong with this but it does feel like the stylistic palettes Twigs derives from her forebears are not built into anything particularly new or recognisable. Therefore, while I enjoy the majority of songs on here, I’m not sure how much impact this record will really have on me in the fullness of time. It’s definitely worth a listen but, after this long a wait, it isn’t quite the definitive artistic statement one would have hoped for from FKA Twigs’ return.
Did you enjoy this article? Be sure to let us know! Follow us, leave a comment, share, or use the ‘applause’ function here on Medium.
If you’d like to cast a vote in the Album of the Week poll, don’t forget to follow our Twitter. We’ll also keep you posted on all our latest reviews, interviews, and radio shows.
