(4AD RECORDINGS; 2024)
Before I attempt to justify my opinion that this Swedish artist has made one of the absolute best albums of the year, let me provide some context. While I have been a music reviewer for a few decades now, the most magical period of doing so was roughly from 2002 to 2008. In that first decade of the new millennium, I was a co-editor of PLAYBACK STL (which had a print edition for half a dozen years), a contributing writer to fLUSH (the predecessor of ZACHARY MULE, which you are reading right now), and a contributor to an all-Scandinavian review zine called IT’S A TRAP. I became something of a Nordic obsessive, kicked off initially by my adoration for the Norwegian girl trio Ephemera and fueled by other singular artists such as Stina Nordenstam, Bol, Maria Solheim, Efterklang and too many others to mention. I developed a theory that something in the cultural DNA of the Scandinavian countries resulted in a music-making process and production aesthetic that was substantially different from what we’re used to in America. Intimate, close-mic’d vocals and emotive detail in both performance and overall arrangement were two of the stylistic traits, I felt, and album after album bore me out on that. I fell in love with the sound, and though the industry and music zines overall would take major hits in the millennium’s second decade, I would never forget the musical bliss I experienced for some wonderful years.
Becky and the Birds, the artistic moniker of inventive Swedish “songbird” Thea Gustafsson, have just released their debut, ONLY MUSIC MAKES ME CRY NOW, and it is an absolute sonic tour de force. Had this album come out back in the IT’S A TRAP days, I would’ve raved about it and tried to find a few similar artists to compare it to. But here and now, in 2024, this thing strikes me as one of the most crazily original platters to come along in years. And it’s just what I needed in this post-election nightmare when nothing makes sense anymore, up is down and black is white. What we have here is an adventurous, largely electronica-based cut-and-paste surge of energetic short songs led by a creatively driven young woman who’s been honing her compositional skills and production techniques for some years, and is now ready to serve us this heaping platter of stunningly original gems to help lighten our load, as she’s clearly done for herself. A strong sense of melancholy runs through this thing, and it struck me at times as a dedicated attempt to explore the dream state, or perhaps remain IN it, during the aftermath of some kind of chaos or pain. Every song moves past quickly and is PACKED with musical details, such as the beautiful piano chord progression in “I Made My Baby Cry” (and first use of real harmonies on the disc) to the low-level pulse that precedes an actual beat in “Everything” (where you hear the word “Damn!” uttered twice and the title repeated multiple times), to the hypnotic totality of “When She Holds Me,” one of the album’s true gems, where the repeated simple guitar chords and ethereal rise of wordless vocals are truly mesmerizing. Gustafsson’s lyrics are not always genuinely clear, but I think I heard the line “The world is wishing me well” in this entrancing song, and it struck me as poignant.
I wrote down the phrase “skittering, erratic currents of electronic sound” to attempt to sum up the musical approach on this album. Loops are employed regularly but are sometimes interrupted by other loops or sounds or Gustafsson’s own vocals, which by nature of being distinctly airy, sweet and sometimes haunted-sounding, provide a memorable counterpoint to the often technology-driven arrangements here. “To Trust You” is a video available to follow lyrically on the Birds’ website… there’s some distortion here and there, but you can clearly hear Gustafsson singing “If it happened once/Why wouldn’t it happen twice?” and this is thematically one of a number of songs dealing with relationship fallout and heartache. In the track “I Look At the Choices I Made,” the weirdness of both the vocals and arrangement gave me the impression that our singer cannot actually ARTICULATE those choices in a normal “conversational” manner, so she’s letting the music convey how tough that is. And in “London Is Not the Same” (the second supercool song of the year to express a personal change because of the U.K’s biggest city, the other tune being Taylor Swift’s haunting “So Long London”), the soundscape is flat-out weird and genuinely melodic in equal measure, something I quite enjoyed. You won’t learn WHY London is different now according to Gustafsson, but no matter… everything about this track is utterly compelling. So is “Anymore,” with its five-tone sequence played at the lower end of the keyboard preceding Gustafsson’s buoyant vocal, “I Made My Baby Cry” (which hardly needs many other lyrics to drive its mournful point home), the almost normal-sounding “Elsa 4-Ever” with its uncharacteristically solitary guitar picking in the background and a clear upfront vocal, and the remarkable “Celebrity//Don’t Leave,” a song that really got to me and that I should have listened to several more times before writing this review. My lord, this is one of the most original compositions I’ve heard in a couple of years. And Gustafsson sings it with some of the most bracing, powerhouse vocals ever laid down in this modern era. In the early part of the song, some of her phrasing is vaguely reminiscent of FOLKLORE-era Taylor Swift, an impression heightened by a male vocal offering counterpoint in the song briefly. “Take some time,” Gustafsson starts to sing, with an uncertain follow-up after. We soon get almost a literal spigot of unusual musical ideas flowing, spreading, forming puddles of sound you are trying to let your ears maneuver through until it all ends, in devastating manner, with her singing “Don’t leave me like this” several times, with the final one being stark and somber. I’m not sure I have heard a minute on ANY recent album as overpowering as this; it’s right up there with Taylor’s “How much sad did you/Think I had?” on her TORTURED POETS… album.
Becky and the Birds, just wow. I am deeply grateful to Thea and her focused, self-aware musical exploration on this debut for giving me the sensation of getting IMMERSED in and haunted by a new album again; it hasn’t happened for a while. This is incredibly original music, my friends… while it has elements of electronica, old-school R&B and even Hip-Hop in a few places, I can safely say you’ve never heard anything like this before. It’s music made, I think, out of chaos and pain, with a sense that the biggest things we want to say in life… out of lost love, a sense of helplessness, a sense of extreme hurt and disbelief and more… perhaps can’t really be said completely. There are only FRAGMENTS of emotion possible, tossed-off comments, and the dream state, where deep wishes collide with nightmares and unendurable sorrows. I can’t know exactly what Thea Gustafsson has been through anymore than she can know the anguish I have felt for months, myself. But I can nod, knowingly at her declaration that “Only music can make me cry now.” And let me add that I have a feeling only THIS music will make me tear up for a while… it’s beautiful, unsettling, crazy, non-linear and deeply soothing all at the same time. Becky and the Birds have truly made one of the most distinctive albums of the year… it has helped me FIND a little something that I had lost in myself, and I am grateful.