Back in May, we shared ‘Staff of the Flag’, the lead single from album Dirt Soda by AJ Lambert, a song based around a fictional flower seller working the notorious stretch of road where James Dean and many others met their end. The song was indicative of Lambert’s inventive and evocative style, delving into characters both real and imaginary with a raw intensity, allowing a window into the darker parts of the human psyche. “Her creative, genre-bending style,” we wrote, “creat[es] self-described ‘distorted anthems’ which blur the line between reality and dreams.”
If AJ Lambert’s other project Bloodslide hints at her singular artistic vision, then her solo work allows her to explore different directions without being held to any one style. With an assembled band featuring Jeff Friedl (Devo, A Perfect Circle), Parker Kindred (Joan As Policewoman), Rhys Hastings (Yves Tumor), Dave Harrington (Darkside) and Kenny Gilmore (Julia Holter), AJ Lambert uses Dirt Soda as a vehicle for her ideas, no matter how idiosyncratic or daring they might be. “I worked once again with Sonny Diperri which is always a treat for me since he really lets me experiment and doesn’t shoot any idea down,” Lambert explains of the recording process, “no matter how strange or unlikely to work it might seem.”
Latest single ‘My Blood’ is another window into this world. A track both moody and sinuous, it balances lightness and weight to create an inscrutable mood. One undeniably beguiling yet underscored by a certain volatility, as though beneath the surface lies some black depth as of yet charted. This duality is central to the themes of a song “about having parts of yourself—whether within you or without you—that can never be connected and reconciled no matter how much you want that,” as Lambert explains. As though to be a person is to be torn between two or more poles, to never fully be oneself.
The song comes complete with a dance-based video directed by Eleanor Petry. A dreamlike vision which sees this dualism manifest. “The video came to me purely about movement at first—the song just screams out for dance to me,” Lambert says, “and then I realized there was an opportunity to merge that confident mover with a completely static and wretched character to show the contrast between the two aspects of life that can’t be joined, and to show how tragic that is.”
Dirt Soda is out now and available to stream and buy from the AJ Lambert Bandcamp page.
Photo by Elisabeth Carren