Meaning Eventually Finds Its Place In FKA Twigs’ Grandiose Artistic Vision
By: Tony Solovjov
Tags: Review, Music, Art, Pop, Culture

Meaning Eventually Finds Its Place In FKA Twigs’ Grandiose Artistic Vision

Her latest LP “MAGDALENE” is an interstellar voyage through the dust of the broken heart to the planet of self

During her long-lasting hiatus, the avant-garde pop princess FKA Twigs got crushed by the brutal hands of her troubled relationships — falling in love with the ex-blood sucker Robert Pattinson and splitting with him in a seemingly heart-wrecking manner. Two years following the end of this romance, twigs comes back feeling quite herself and ready to baptise her loyal fanbase in the career-defining shrift.

In the pre-“MAGDALENE” era, British-born singer and songwriter Taliah Barnett took on a cunning challenge to manufacture the new RnB sound — blending her fragile-sounding soprano and the spooky art-house opera inspired imagery with the precision and inanimation of electronic music. Her efforts were met with universal critical acclaim, but looking in retrospect, the alien world twigs built around herself felt overwhelmed by her pompous visionary yet lacking raw human experience.

In this sense, “MAGDALENE” comes through as a true revelation, being an album that runs on the fuel of imaginative lyricism and storytelling. Here, Twigs tries on the image of Mary Magdalene and tells us the love story with her very own Jesus, drawing inspiration from the chants of classical religious music and futuristic electronic sounds.

The album starts with “thousand eyes” and, in an instance, enswathes you with a death-bearing sound of acapella choral signing and thud but heavy background instrumental, serving as a reminder of memorial liturgy music stripped off to its most naked condition. Alongside this soul-shivering melody, Twigs begins her Skaespherean story of spiritual death and thorny resurrection.

If I walk out the door, it starts our last goodbye

If you don’t pull me back, it wakes a thousand eyes

Going forward, the narrative unfurls in a surprisingly cohesive manner, letting Twigs’ vocal arrangements and poetic talent shine the way they’ve never had before. No matter what it is — the antithesis of distorted chest voice and paper-light head voice on “home with you”, or the intimate insight into the secrets of womanhood on “mary magdalene” — Twigs serves us a bowl full of ripe-fruit she religiously gathered at the garden of Eden.

There are many great moments on “MAGDALEN” — either lyrically, sonically or vocally — but the times it ascends to the sky-high levels lie at the intersection of the experimental search Twigs underwent in her previous work and the lucidity of pop-sound she tamed with the help of her fellow co-writers and co-producers. The result of this artistic confluence materialized in “sad day”, which might be remembered as one of the best pop tracks of this decade.

Channelling Kate Bush ethereal timbre, Twigs starts the track by whispering simple yet beautiful lyrics into the isolation of her listener's auricles, and then the melody expands into this epic dance/electronic ballad where Skrillex’s production touch suddenly falls in place and electrifies the record.

Bearing in mind how great the rest of the album is, it’s at best puzzling how “holy terrain” featuring Future made it to the final cut. It’s a commercially-baked, mediocre RnB song made to, perhaps, please the wider audience. A sad but not criminal oversight which gets forgotten as soon as the record ends.

Despite being listed as the sixth track, “fallen alien” comes through as the culminating phase of the narrative. It’s the most experimental track on the album exposing Twigs in her most desperate state. She basically goes on a full-scale jihad against her former lover. Her vocals here are nothing less than transcending: incisive, hysterical, in a good sense of this word, and on the edge of breaking loose into a wild scream.

The last three songs reveal Twigs meditating on the aftermath of relationships and reconciling with the damage left after it. The album ends with the lead single “cellophane”, a beautiful piano ballad which wraps all the memories and feelings into a thin, transparent sheet of regenerated cellulose.

All wrapped in cellophane, the feelings that we had.

It might sound trivial but the beauty of “MAGDALENE” truly lies in the eyes of its beholder. You can try and disentangle it into separate pieces to only be left with the overwhelming layers of artificial noises and digitally-produced sounds. But looking at “MAGDALENE” in its entirety reveals a timeless piece of pop art which was born in a happy marriage of a self-aware artist and her multifaceted talent.

P.S.

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