LYA is the debut album from Fanpage, the recording project of Sweden’s Elsa Kristina Sundin. If you missed out on the act’s previous (and very good) EP, Trip, then you should know that the Fanpage ethos is to take the dream pop formula and to mess around with it, both stylistically and in terms of hardware, utilizing FX pedals to create a sound that seems to have seeped through from some alternate zone. What it all adds up to is a beguiling blend of elements both pop and experimental, a mix that will doubtless appeal to fans of Fever Ray, Jenny Hval and Oh, Rose.
The album kicks off with lead single, ‘Rain Days For Bad Songs’, a strong start which acts as the perfect introduction of the beautiful weird to come. In our preview we described the track (rather accurately) as “an off-kilter electro-pop song just managing to keep it’s head above a swirling noise, like a radio hit from your favourite recurring dream.”
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‘Long Walk to all Sort of Places’ starts all slinky, with whispery “sshhh”s and noodly little synths that worm in from the ominous noir that surrounds the song. The whole thing sounds slightly unhinged, with an odd, unearthly atmosphere that quickly establishes itself as the signature of LYA. ‘Y U’ takes things even darker and weirder, with a steady, slow thump of percussion and background “vocals” which sound for all the world like feedback-riddled moans and screams. Even the lulls in the maelstrom have a rumbling sense of mechanical foreboding, and the lyrics are just as black: “I got those witches at my side / some things crawling as I turn on the light.” It’s genuinely unsettling, bringing to mind some of the tracks on Oh Rose’s recent SEVEN in its almost horror-level intensity (if not quite in throat-shredding yells). ‘Murder’ cools the mood with the air of woozy hallucination, the pretty dream-pop vocals delivering not-so-pretty lines. “We know you are gonna get another fire hun”, she sings. “Setting flames to light another guilty pleasure in the setting sun”. However beneath the composed vocals swirl strange cries, a thousand flavours of hysteria as heard from behind locked doors and thick walls.
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From here, things don’t quieten down. ‘Helena’ has unusual effects on the vocals that transform them into the high pitched whine of a buzz saw, and ‘Reply Please’ is all disturbed paranoia, with drum machine beats that sound like the agitated pulses of a delirious body, everything somehow bleached hot-red like a wobbled vision from within the throes of a fever. ‘I Got My Piano at Six’ is a haunted instrumental, all devious feedback and heavy oppressive atmosphere with weird piano that seems to ripple and quiver into the distance, while ‘Cry Me a River’ comes across oddly understated with a spare drum beat and shoegazey post-rock atmospherics, the lyrics painting a picture gaunt and crumbling, vague poetry of negative urges and self destruction. Follow-up ‘Within You’ is a schizophrenic pop track with lyrics delivered in almost robotic monotone, noise spooking the edges like a static fog, while ‘Check My Heart’ advances in a shadowy slow glide, like a flashy car coasting neon-glared midnight streets in some 80s thriller, before descending into bursts of high-pitched derangement, rain-slicked hairpin bends and cackles rising from seedy back alleys. ‘Boys’ plays like a bizarro r&b track, clanking along with a hundred textures of noise, the creepily sensual pop music that all the post-human android bars will be playing in 2116, again with lyrics that defy initial definition:
“Got me, got two tickets out, got me, got a witch inside
got a tendency to lour, got a friend I gotta hold on
hey girl – watch meGot me, got to figure it out, Got me, got someone possessing me
got a cold heart I borrow , got an angel inside a bottle”
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The album finishes with ‘Poser’, its humid breathy ambience and slow precision building and building, passing from a sense of clarity into something else entirely, something massive, too large to see or describe. The song is imbued with a sense of clear-minded determination, as if operating to a logic clear to the narrator, if not to us.
“I keep on hiding in my den as summers passing and winters sometimes
I watch my spelling how I write, if I dress in colours my heart turns beigeI got some secrets in my bag, some words might slip but not this one, not this one
Somebody said I tried, I tried, somebody said I loved I died
oh, I got it. I think I got it to late this time”
Fanpage’s music occupies a space between life and imitation, too mechanical to be described as organic yet too intuitive and mysterious for machines. It wanders a strange distance ahead of the human race, amongst a chaos born of our need for order. Love and delirium and bright white fear roil beneath the feedback, humanity kicking and twisting within a noise filled with myth and magic and dread. Terrifying and beautiful and glorious, LYA is an album for the information age, where data has exploded to incomprehensible volumes and become its own wilderness.
You can buy LYA right now via the ever-wonderful Fox Food Records, either as a digital download or on a lovely limited-edition cassette, designed by Alexander Wireen.
