claire rousay + more eaze

Never Stop Texting Me

Genre: ELECTRONIC

LP (Black Vinyl)
Cassette

Boomkat Product Review:

Well, fuck what you know about claire rousay & more eaze, as they probe saccharine hyper-pop on a mad but fascinating one, including cameos by How To Dress Well and bloodzboi, for the revered Orange Milk label.

After building a strong rep for messing with lower case ambient and avant-classical convention in recent years, the duo change tack almost entirely to find a sort of skewed honesty in pop music - we’re talking proper melodies and choruses, and lyrics about crushes and the like. Of course, we say they almost entirely switch it up, but there’s still traces of their puckered avant-classical tekkerz in play, placing this surprising new body of work in a light shared by the legendary efforts of Lovely Music Inc., with a style of composition that challenges perceptions of contemporary pop; fiddling with its tropes and finding a peculiar, gurned reflection in the process.

Where there was a groggy magick to their earlier works, these ones are soberly upfront and piquant with melody, offering a glaring focus on the alien weirdness of autotune that dials up comparisons with Rebecca Black via “Blue” Gene Tyranny and Arca. If we’re quite honest, it all makes us feel uncomfortable in the most perplexing way. We’re compelled/repelled in equal measure by the sunny pop-rock pomp of ‘hands’, and find ourselves snagged on the pop R&B ickiness of ‘iphone2’, while ‘camille’ and ‘floor pt2’ fruitily short-circuit naif dance/trap-pop tropes. There’s a clear standout, no matter which way you look at it, in the warped ambient-pop of ‘missed’ ft. relatively straight-played appearance of HTDW and bloodzboi, and it’s not hard to hear claire & more eaze’s classical chamber affectations eliding puckered pop structures in ‘art’.

2022’s earliest and biggest head-scratcher, right here.

LP (Black Vinyl) (10)