Molly Drag is the solo project of Ontario’s Michael Hansford, a member of London band The Raspberry Heaven. Deeply Flawed sees Hansford strip down his band’s emo sound to create something fragile and passionate and confused in a way that mirrors life.
‘Knee Highs’ is an example of this, starting an a simple emo strum-along before morphing with some hardcore-style screaming and eventually settling into an ambient track with spoken word delivery. The track successfully captures the spectrum of emotions faced by a typical young person, wistful angst interspersed with anger or terror and sometimes followed by a clear-eyed calm where even one’s own suffering can seem poetic. Hansford layers his tracks to mimic the mind’s habit of jumping from emotion to emotion, the human curse of feeling sadness and fury and outrage and vulnerability all at once.
This continues across the twenty tracks. ‘I Needed to See it Burn’ blends violence with brittle weakness, ‘Heirloom’ has a shoegazy coating of fuzz, and ‘The Ghost at Woodland Park’ and ‘Post-Nothing’ adopt an almost noise rock sound, the instrumentation playing like the Twilight Sad with the volume turned down. ‘Love Isn’t All You Need’ has a gentle ambient backing while ‘Sacrifices Speak’ uses synths and echoes and spoken word to create a track that sounds either primeval or spacey in a sci-fi way.
Each track is accompanied with forthright and earnest lyrics that come from numerous situations and points of view, admissions of weakness and misery paradoxically suggesting bravery or strength in a weak-to-be-strong sort of way. The whole thing is admirable and relatable and impressively moving, holding a flame to the inherent confusion and grief of being young in the twenty-first century. As Hansford sings on ‘Terrible Things’:
“You struggle with your body
with what you eat.
A slave to what is trendy
and who you meet.
Human, ‘cos this is it.
This is it,
but we move on.”
You can buy the album now via Bandcamp or grab a cassette from Hellur Records.