The artist returns shrouding candid emotion in cleverly arranged music and sound.
Photo: Nathan Dunphy | Words: Elida Silvey
Katie Lynch dons the moniker Theo Bleak once more on new her new EP 'Pain', allowing her to puppeteer her intimate emotions with confidence and candour. Utilizing everything from the impression of strings to the layering of tones, Theo Bleak creates a painfully intimate sound bath from which she delivers her spellbinding wisdom. On 'Pain,' she explores the fluid spaces of her mental health, particularly the difficulties experienced within the dips and dives of complex relationships, and everyday girldom. The bubbling up of sadness in her work brings with it a level of honesty that makes her work feel like nothing shy of the truth.
The brilliantly hazy fuzz of Theo Bleak's lyrics and voice is met with distorted guitars, reminiscent of shoegaze greats, guiding the listener through the trudging trenches of another emotional black out. 'Its not doing me any good' is a standout track, with powerful and eerily relatable lyrics. Lines such as "you steal all my ideas as yours, I see it now, underscored", highlight the helplessness of the everyday woman, releasing it into the void like a curse, with an extra dose of oomph. This EP is replete with sad-girl anthems where the listener will catch themself singing along, "It's not doing me any good" and. "Spit it out, I look like a fool to you" into their bedroom mirror with projected gusto.
This EP elegantly oscillates in place, highlighting the internal mind of Theo Bleak while simultaneously pushing the listener to experience the external, utilising the precarious bits and pieces reminiscent of heart break, break ups and emotional turmoil. "It's raining all the time" combines these two spaces expertly by exploring such challenges with the metaphor of rain clouds. While one could argue that this lyrical idea lingers on the edge of cliche, Theo Bleak pulls us back into her phonetic embrace with the embodiment of this metaphor in the music and sound construction. The song achieves this with a concoction of bursting guitar noise, delineated with the pitter patter of delicate keys, broken up, like sunshine parting clouds, with the sound of birds in the distance. These birds effectively close the book on the relationship being explored in the song and constitute a clever way to close out this brilliant EP.
No comments:
Post a Comment