Features | Unison / Harmony 2014

FKA twigs

By Mark Abraham | 19 December 2014

On LP1, Tahliah Barnett leaves no vanishing point. Every ebb and waver of every pitch-bent chord is meant to defy perspective; parallel lines stay parallel no matter how far you look. Barnett provides picture, structure, and diction, but emphasizes that these things don’t always matter. For example, you can hear words on “Closer,” but you can also hear not-words; the song is a duet where one voice is a synthetic harmony that has had its attack removed. When mouths stay open? Consonants become vowels and words become round tunnels. Noises become the skeletal structures that keep these tunnels from closing or ending. On multiple songs, words are stuttered and repeated in the foreground or background; things said out loud conceal, reveal, or transcend things that are too hard to say out loud. Non-vocal noises are given vowel shapes; clauses have no punctuation. Text and subtext are given equal volume; stray thoughts are captured and become part of the fabric of the music. Thoughts are abandoned or interrupted. Communication breaks down. LP1 is almost the same conversation 10 times in a row, rendered in exhausting detail.

Barnett isn’t doing stream of consciousness; the structure here is stasis. Viewed up close—and each song here is really close—these iterations of this conversation seem laborious and epic. Barnett plays a different version of her omnipresent “I” in each version. Some “I”-voices are bold, some are reticent, and some introspective. If we zoom out, however, each “I” is identical—i.e. the same person—and each song becomes part of a greater structure: a woven tapestry from which all the horizontal threads has been removed, or a series of identical tunnels running in parallel. Rigid. Strict enough to keep bodies from engaging in motion, or pleasure. Stranded, caught over-thinking single, fraught words that never reach their conclusion. Even “Hours”—the only song on LP1 that literally describes two bodies actively touching, and not just talking about or thinking about touching—is about being caught in a moment: kissing for hours. Except…all of the lyrics are about the processes and theory of kissing. Barnett takes pleasure in hours of the epistemology of kissing. Which is awesome and sad. The image she creates is two mouths making shapes, joining to make circular vowels larger. It’s mouths open, breathing in and out at the same time.

This is why every song on LP1 has a “you” and an “I” (on “Video Girl,” the “I” is Barnett and the “you” is everybody else); the album is entirely about the difficulty of two entities connecting, and how the relationship between two entities affects the way each entity sees itself. People yearn for one another; people stay lonely. On “Two Weeks,” Barnett tells a potential lover that they must be the sole instigator of an affair; she won’t betray a ciphered third party called “her.” Barnett’s “I” in this context notes that they can “fuck you better than her” at the same time that this “I” cares deeply about the narrative surrounding this liaison: this “I” will take pleasure, but not the guilt of providing a starting point. The result? The “you” of “Two Weeks” is literally caught between the “I”’s legs, mouth open, forming a vowel. Those legs? Two lines extending into infinity. That mouth? If the “you” breathes in, what’s between the “I”‘s two legs will make the “you” “higher than a motherfucker.” If the “you” breathes out, it’s probably just to say, “no,” but doing so while staring down infinity. There’s an epic choice here. At the same time, for all the implied sexuality here, emphasized by the melodic way “high” is sung, note that the chorus makes it clear that it will take two whole weeks for the “you” to no longer recognize the “her.” There’s no instant magic here; there’s just iteration: “‘I’ can make ‘you’ forget about ‘her’ if we have a lot of sex over a two week period.” Just like how on “Hours” intimacy slowly “rounds off your edges.” Or how on “Number” the “I” asks, “Was I just a number to you?” An iteration? Or how also on “Number” the “I” asks, “Was I just a?” before the clip stops, as if what the “I” could be has infinite iterations.

Obviously it could. Whether looking at the cover or listening to the music, numerous versions of the “I” emerge. Is the “I” bruised and in pain? Are they sad and lonely? Are they blushing and innocent, or blushing and fulfilled with pleasure? Empty with pleasure? Perplexed with pleasure? Are they object or subject? Protagonist or antagonist? This confusion seems to me to be the point. This album is not about ennui or existentialism; it’s about the way every exhalation, gesture, and word is loaded with so much meaning that the meanings themselves become structures that hold us in place. Real conversations can’t end because context keeps people from expressing themselves. Ideas are repeated. Narratives are repeated. Longings are repeated. Sexuality isn’t just about desire; it’s about how we identify ourselves. Every song on LP1 has a “you” and “I” because every “you” and every “I” is a person trying to be. Barnett explores being different “I“s even though the result is often the same. On “Two Weeks” she plays seductress. On “Hours” she plays loving and intimate. On “Number” she plays hurt and confused. On “Pendulum”—the only song on the album where the title is neither utilitarian (“Preface”) or said in the song, and therefore the only title of a song on the album that is purely descriptive—she plays unable to express her feelings. She—at the halfway point of her album—is a pendulum between iterations. This could be read as a feminist deconstruction of the roles women are expected to play in a patriarchal society; this could be read as a narrative exploration of the same roles. Either way, these are sexual identities that have complicated ideas about sex.

I don’t know that there are really conclusions to make here. I think what FKA twigs is trying to pull off is a work in progress. But “Kicks,” the song that closes LP1, is about self-pleasure, and its final line is this: “Baby, it’s clear.” It’s hard not to read that as the sole emphatic expression of closure on an album that is otherwise about everything but.