FKA twigs

Pretty much with deej on this. I like Pendulum a lot tho

clams is on 'Hours' along with dev hynes (and apparently haynie too)

her contrasting bridges/middle eights are so key to this album - they really provide a focus to some songs that would otherwise just be about sound design. "how would you like it if my lips touched yours", "how does it feel to have me thinking about you", "feel your body closing i can rip it open" etc

Yeah I feel like the real emotive momentum of a lot of these songs is in the bridges - Two Weeks especially.

She's like a broken Anita Baker singing at you from a far so you can only hear parts of her

That makes it sound pretty cool.

has anyone heard the bonus tracks off this + are they good

I didn't know there were any, let alone FOUR of them! :D

Wait, FIVE of them!

Oh wait, the Japanese bonus tracks are the contents of "EP1".

and this one it looks like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzWCo-Z_a50

Oh wait, the Japanese bonus tracks are the contents of "EP1".

― Johnny Fever, Thursday, December 4, 2014 11:22 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

oh lol

i hope twigs & inc do more stuff together

There is one bonus track that came on a 7" with vinyl copies of LP1, though, but I can't seem to find a stream of it online that hasn't been pulled down.

isn't that the one i just posted?

FKA x inc. actually doesn't have a title (it's just listed as "FKA x inc."), but the song on the 7" is titled "One Time."

ah, maybe this one?
http://1998miracle.tumblr.com/post/94932044236/fka-twigs-one-time

ding! ding!

New video for "Pendulum"

http://t.co/Dk4ag4jPFg

wow why did i not know about this album until now

No idea but it rules pretty hard

wow, man, this is good.

listening through a second time looking at the lyrics and...these are not the lyrics i was expecting. there's a dissonance between the weightlessness of the music and the...aggressiveness of the lyrics that's really powerful

I wouldn't call the music weightless. To my ears it's sounds like Maxinequaye, passed "Chinese whisper" style through a couple decades of UK bass.

The use of space in the music on this album is brilliant. Much more refined than the music from the preceding EPs IMO.

saw her live last night in camden. quite a bit of padding out (mainly with dancers) as it went on, but she only has one album so thats not that unusual. did found the mood a bit *too* consistent at times, its all sluggigh tempo/atmospheric textures/naify-waify-dreamy and girl-like vocals, which made me appreciate the songs which are a bit stronger the most (closer, 2 weeks, lights on). there was one point near the end where she started doing some almost prince-ly note-holding, which surprised me as i thought her voice was quite limited, which was the reason she always sounds a bit mannered and pinched. she is a great performer/dancer - i think her as a physical performer is the most interesting thing about what she does, more than even the music, in a live context. and she obv knows how to make a show look interesting with lights/choreography (was one point where i thought i was watching close encounters of the 3rd kind). not to sound like a john harris-type, but i would like to see her get a bit less arty, and a bit more tuneful/populist. she has presence, but you definitely feel a boundary between you and her.

It wasn't "padding" - the dancing was *the whole point*. She played for nearly two hours and only half of that was the album, and even then bits of songs were fragmented, reappearing later on, or drowned under blasts of noise or sudden left turns into rave beats. She came on and played 'Preface' surrounded by a ring of figures in cloaks, holding lamps, like creepy cult members. The first few songs were played with just her in the spotlight, barely visible, like an early Tricky gig, her band somewhere way back in the darkness - obviously the lights only came one after she had played 'Lights On'.

The whole show was extremely, expertly choreographed, massive stacked dudes flinging her around, like 1991-era Madonna show exported to slow-motion modern dance, at one point a song actually broke into stilted, skewed vogueing. There were at least two contortionists on stage. At one point she was offstage entirely, or at least in the background, while two of the male dancers danced together to just a violin and Arca-style beats. Another song was performed while dancing in a cage of red lasers. And then she played 'Two Weeks' right at the end and it was astonishing.

Most of it was more like watching a strange avant-ballet performance than a gig itself - I know comparing female artists to Kate Bush is lame and lazy but it really did feel like an early Kate show in the scale of its ambition and approach. She is clearly a strong singer, it was all very breathy but she hit every note while performing physical moves that most people couldn't even imagine doing, let alone while singing.

She came on at the end and talked to the audience for a while and she was super-charming and personable and clearly blown away somewhat by the occasion. I'm pretty sure the last thing I saw on that stage was The Knife's final year Goldsmith's nonsense, and I was conscious throughout that Twigs was beating that show at virtually everything it was trying to do, while being a genuinely incredible performance in its own right.

i dont really disagree with anything you wrote, i suppose it depends on how much you really love the album. i think she is amazing as a perfomer/personality, im more a fan of her than her music. when i say padding out, sure, there was a lot of expert choreography, that goes without saying, but at times i felt like the music, even when it was playing out like an interesting deconstructed version of the recorded versions, was taking a backseat to her giving her dancers time to stretch out. and it wasnt always with a purpose, it was simply to give them some stage time. some of what they were doing was pretty awe inspiring, but it was like when youd see a janet jackson or madonna show and she would introduce her dancers one by one, and give them a few minutes to show off, which twigs actually did when the lights went up at the end, but there was a bit too much of it during the main event (just without the introductions!).

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/live-music-reviews/11423160/FKA-Twigs-Roundhouse-review.html

"On paper, it sounds ridiculous. On stage, moments of it were ingeniously so. More were indulgent and overwrought. Among all the acrobatics, there were mere minutes where Twigs truly kept the hungry crowd captive with her musical performance; she was too often strangled by her own elaborate stagecraft, her otherworldly features bleached out by cannons of light.

But Twigs’s ambition should be applauded, regardless of the consistency of its realisation. This show was paean not to her voice, but to the entirety of her musical vision. With it, she proved she has much to come – even if she has yet to acquire the stage presence to shoulder it."

"There were at least two contortionists on stage."

idk why but i hear this in the voice of a war correspondent

show descrip sounds off the charts

xp
Kind of an odd thing to be unspecific about unless there were like a bunch of other people milling about that appeared to be only half-contortionist.

Damn, I saw her less than a month ago and it sounds like what I saw was way less elaborate than this - no backup dancers or anything. Still an absolutely electrifying performer though even when just spiralling and twirling around on her own.

Came here to post about the Roundhouse show but Matt DC nailed it

this sounds like an amazing show and all i can say (especially after being impressed by twigs' videos and overall aesthetic) is I wished I liked the music more.

Some of what they were doing was pretty awe inspiring, but it was like when youd see a janet jackson or madonna show and she would introduce her dancers one by one, and give them a few minutes to show off, which twigs actually did when the lights went up at the end, but there was a bit too much of it during the main event (just without the introductions!).

Obv I wasn't there, but whether this is a good or bad thing might depend if you're there to see Twigs or if you're there to see a performance and it sounds like this is the kind of show that attempts to be something bigger than just a gig, but an artwork in itself.

sure, I think shes got a lot of ambition, and theres a lot of great moments in her show that I will remember, but I think it will be better when the material's stronger. right now, its an interesting art-dance show from someone who knows how to deliver, but without the music to hinge on. deconstructing your material i think only really works when its strong enough to really that bear that kind of breaking apart and i personally find much of her music quite samey and devoid of dynamics. i would be quite happy to watch twigs if she was a performance artist, but its not just that, and couldnt be in a place like the roundhouse.

I still don't understand the "devoid of dynamics" argument considering that the arrangement of every song on the album is a series of controlled crescendos/decrescendos.

No I def get it. It's not so much dynamic range as tempo and stylistic variation. The whole album sounds like an iceberg being dipped slowly into a huge volcanic pool of hot water. That's cool, but like, when I visit a steam room I know it's supposed to be therapeutic but I tend to find the experience consecutively interesting, claustrophobic, soothing and boring. That's exactly how I feel when I listen to Twigs - I find myself thinking 'give it a little longer, it'll be 'good for you'', like it'll suddenly click or reveal itself. But invariably I just find the pace dragging along so slowly that it becomes almost impossible for me to bear. Not even joking, it's just, I just feel like I want to get out before I collapse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNbFc-fa-ww

O_O

now that's some video

so good

welp guess I'm not watching the rest of that at work

What, and not see the Robert Smith cameo towards the end?

heh it actually gets more SFW after the intro, it's just dancing.

xp lol

he's holding on to the end of the fabric, right

Whew, the fashion show in the forest following the magic birthing scarves...
Her aesthetic is pretty well delineated but it ain't me babe

Should probably go ahead with the Howard Schatz directed video, already.

i am in awe of this woman

radio doc tonight on Radio 1 -

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05mpwdb

so this only exists on youtube so far, right

i wish artists would just PUT THINGS ON ITUNES