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“We’re not chasing happiness any more, girls/ We’re chasing nothing/ The great big still/ The great blue OK… and we’re OK today,” intones Rebecca Lucy Taylor on the opening track of A Complicated Woman. Her third album as Self Esteem is so theatrical she could have titled it Millennial Me: The Musical. Beats seem to bounce from the stark stage surface as narratives are emoted into a headset mic.
Throughout, Taylor is backed by a choir who chant the song’s title “I Do and I Don’t Care”, tongues on teeth, smacking confession and defiance into each consonant like the chorus in a stage musical. You can almost hear the lights dim and sense a spotlight fall on Taylor as her voice arcs upwards in wordless, yearning melody then drops low and steely into her Sheffield accent for a spoken word, scene-setting section of the track, transporting herself back to the age of 15: “Be very careful what you wish for, she said, looking at me all smug… and as yet another person with a doctorate in internet diagnoses me with ADHD, I’m done.” This being a three-act track, the chorus then kicks back in, voicing the question: “If I’m so empowered, why am I such a coward?”
It’s a question that arose in the wake of her star-making second album, 2019’s Prioritise Pleasure. In a recent interview with The Guardian, she spoke of how she found herself – a proudly “good, sturdy girl” who had spent almost 10 years in the band Slow Club before going solo – feeling she needed to make herself (nose job and all) over as “a hot, bleepy bloopy pop girl” now she was famous. Hitting the charts (with songs such as “I Do This All The Time”) in her late thirties found her scrambling to buy her first home, freeze her eggs and keep up with an escalating performance schedule and this album dramatises all the contradictions of anxiety, elation, depression, validation, popularity and loneliness she experienced.
These conflicting, contrasting moods are reflected by A Complicated Woman’s multifaceted sounds. The album delivers glitterball-synth-spinning bops (“Cheers to Me” on which she snaps back at the lovers who are “a sucker for a skinny motherf***er”), tender, piano-backed laments for past lovers moving on (“Logic, Bitch!”) motivational mantras (“Focus is Power”), diaristic raps (all over the place), acoustic guitar backed soul-searchers (“In Plain Sight”) and full-on, footlights-up anthems (“What Now”). The slow-mo, indie-strummed and orchestral “The Curse” finds the singer in pavement-chasing Adele-mode as she addresses her drinking; eye-rolling those who’ve been able to quit and balancing her admission that “I wouldn’t do it if it didn’t f***ing work” with sloppy overspills of “f*** you” as an electric guitar solo noodles its way into the gutter while violins chase the stars. The hooks are strong.
I particularly enjoyed the snarky “Mother” on which Taylor bluntly refuses to parent a lover (“falling asleep on my chest is your fantasy but where does that leave me? Who’s holding me?”) in a low, contemptuous growl over a raw, tough beat and low, panicky exhalations of panpipe. The fizzy, jittery pulse of “Lies” spits with scorn.
At times the whole jazz-hands-emoted, Original Cast Recording! vibe can grate; the stageyness undercutting the intimacy of Taylor’s sharp, literate lyrics. At others, the evident effort of performance plays winkingly well into the choreography of her self-dramatising self-analysis. Her voice effectively plays many characters, swooping from feathery sweetness to muttered cussing. I suspect the moments that echo flatly of the rehearsal studio on the album will burst into electric life on tour this summer. Taylor can take a bow.
English (US) ·