Simply greater than midway via her twenties, Ally Evenson has a pair questions for whoever’s in cost: “Am I who I’m rising into? Will I be greater than only a face? Will I be extra if I’m erased?” On the opening monitor of her debut album, BLUE SUPER LOVE, she hovers in a weightless void of shimmering THX Deep Notes, weighing the paths earlier than her: to have “enjoyable in hell or shitty heaven.” Evenson chooses violence. Proper earlier than its two-minute mark, “Shitty Heaven” breaks into an sudden, dirty drum ’n’ bass vamp—throughout which, within the accompanying visible, the Detroit singer-songwriter contemplates a gushing head wound and slips on a pair of sun shades. Then—wham—she’s struck by a brand new rush of noise with all of the drive and strain of an underwater vacuum implosion or particularly violent Turnstile present. By dramatically altering the track’s momentum twice in only a few minutes, Evenson units the album’s temper as a home with the gasoline left on, liable to combust on the strike of a match.
Whereas Evenson’s earlier Bandcamp releases match squarely within the mould of downcast indie rock, BLUE SUPER LOVE units itself aside by leaning laborious into smeared textures—movement blur, the excitement of a vocoder, the grain of a digital digicam—and sharp edges. The melody on “The place Are You Going?”, one of many report’s sweetest, wouldn’t be misplaced within the mouth of Gracie Abrams; nonetheless, distortion crackles overhead, whereas drums pummel and pop like one thing off the newest Bully report. Evenson’s instincts have at all times leaned pop, and now she and producer Nydge have constructed a widescreen, electrical sound to match. “You Poor Factor” has its loping rhythm periodically interrupted by screams and blasts of noise, as Evenson’s chiming guitar mocks the unlucky soul to be on the receiving finish of her vitriol. “You look fairly/in your knees,” she coos, and it’s laborious to inform which strains come from her, and which she’s parrotting from the “golden coaster, fuckin’ freeloader” who’s the track’s goal.
Evenson’s voice—which is to say, each her writerly voice and her precise timbre—places her within the fabulously bratty lineage of that canine., Veruca Salt, and Charly Bliss. The way in which her tongue dances across the alliteration of “pals who fuck round” on “Cross My Fingers” injects its in any other case saccharine lyrics with an ideal dose of venom. In the meantime, “I would like you, and I want you, so come for me/and I would like you, and I want you, so consolation me” from “One thing In The Water” is Evenson’s personal twisted model of “come proper on me—I imply camaraderie,” delivered atop a mattress of mellow pop-rock that fizzes like precise Pop Rocks. The storytelling on BLUE SUPER LOVE additionally will get an help from rigorously deployed vocal results. The breakdown of “One thing In The Water” pans Evenson’s voice aspect to aspect as she sings “I’m at all times right here, I’m at all times there,” and on “One Trick Pony,” an arsenal of glitches seize the impact of twisting oneself into the perfect lover in actual time.