The veteran Raincoats co-founder, bass player, songwriter, film-maker and feminist artist’s second solo album is a passionate, political and personal release, outspoken, but also eccentric and eclectically introspective. Mixing post-punk, dub, pop and experimental rock, it’s a love letter to her creative, chaotic life, and the people and issues that have inspired her. Joined again by producer and Killing Joke founding member Youth, as well as engineer/mixer Michael Rendall (Peter Murphy, The Jesus and Mary Chain) who worked on 2023’s solo debut, I Play My Bass Loud, it also brings in many friends and collaborators such as fellow artist Helen McCookerybook, and her live band The Unreasonables. At the heart of the album, the title is about being forward-thinking female artist, changing opportunities and “to all the mini revolutions that have occurred in my life, not following the usual paths, falling down holes, making the same mistakes over and over.” Also central, the single Causing Trouble Again is inspired by 2024’s Women in Revolt, an exhibition of feminist art and activism at Tate Britain which included one of Birch’s most recognised art pieces, 1977’s 3 Minute Scream and is a catchy, (as well as musically reminiscent of Joy Division) shout-out to many creative and political heroines of her gender with a video featuring many famous faces. But while Birch is unsinkably energetic and indomitable as an artist figure, with typical eccentricity the opener brings personal, candid revelation about vulnerability. I Thought I’d Live Forever is a sonically experimental number about losing accuracy of senses, especially hearing and taste. Happiness is gentle acoustic dub rumble with sitar and drone sounds about that fleeting, fragile emotion “it comes and goes”. Cello Song is a rather beautiful song with that instrument to the fore, but is about tensions at home (she has teenager daughters) and violent mood swings, while the rest of the album is particularly shaped by internal personal monologues and simple repetitive political or other phrases, from the dubby electronica of Keep To The Left or Doom Monger, further family tensions and love are celebrated on the rippling electronica, funk and trouble Nothing Will Ever Change That, to Hey Hey’s slow but powerful frustration over communication (“words stuck inside my head … I wanted to tell you just how I feel”), the falling love and lust of Sleep, and tailing off into being beguiled by a stranger on Train Platform. Birch is unique voice rather than a singer, but a true original, and this is oddball, eccentric, mercurial, offbeat, sometimes powerfully moving work. Out on Third Man Records.
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