FKA Twigs

dontdiedontkillanyon
dontdiedontkillanyon Members Posts: 10,172 ✭✭✭✭✭
FKA Twigs - Trip-Hop for the 21st century:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OydK91JjFOw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFtMl-uipA8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7CTo2-bAA8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sekBTG99TWs

An artist on the rise who you will be hearing a lot more of/about in the future.
«1

Comments

  • dontdiedontkillanyon
    dontdiedontkillanyon Members Posts: 10,172 ✭✭✭✭✭
    FKA twigs Shares New Song "Two Weeks"

    77756b16.jpg

    FKA twigs will release her debut album, LP1, on August 12. Now, she's shared "Two Weeks", which was premiered by Ellie Goulding (filling in for Zane Lowe) on BBC Radio 1. You can listen to it above just before the 30-minute mark via Disco Naïveté.

  • dontdiedontkillanyon
    dontdiedontkillanyon Members Posts: 10,172 ✭✭✭✭✭
    FKA twigs Announces Debut Album LP1

    77756b16.jpg

    FKA twigs has announced her debut album, which is called... LP1. It'll be out August 12 via Young Turks, and follows her first and second EPs from last year.

    LP1:
    01 Preface
    02 Lights On
    03 Two Weeks
    04 Hours
    05 Pendulum
    06 Video Girl
    07 Numbers
    08 Closer
    09 Give Up
    10 Kicks
  • dontdiedontkillanyon
    dontdiedontkillanyon Members Posts: 10,172 ✭✭✭✭✭
    FKA Twigs - Two Weeks

    The excellent British singer FKA twigs is set to release her first full-length, LP1, and today she drops its first single and video, “Two Weeks.” The song is a sighing, soaring bit of electronic pop, and its lush slow-motion video (directed by Nabil) matches the song’s regal, ethereal beauty. Watch.

    Two Weeks:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yDP9MKVhZc

    LP1 is out 8/12 via Young Turks.

    http://www.stereogum.com/1688634/fka-twigs-two-weeks-video/video/
  • Cunt_Lyfe
    Cunt_Lyfe Members, Writer Posts: 3,998 ✭✭✭✭✭
    First thing I said when I looked at her: "Does Sade have a daughter?"

    Interestingly enough, they have the same birthday.
  • Cunt_Lyfe
    Cunt_Lyfe Members, Writer Posts: 3,998 ✭✭✭✭✭
    I like her style.
  • dontdiedontkillanyon
    dontdiedontkillanyon Members Posts: 10,172 ✭✭✭✭✭
    ? _Lyfe wrote: »
    First thing I said when I looked at her: "Does Sade have a daughter?"

    Interestingly enough, they have the same birthday.

    LOL, didn't even know that about them sharing a birthday. Probably an omen.
  • dontdiedontkillanyon
    dontdiedontkillanyon Members Posts: 10,172 ✭✭✭✭✭
    The album is out there.

    "If Aaliyah and Homogenic-era Bjork had a love child".
  • dontdiedontkillanyon
    dontdiedontkillanyon Members Posts: 10,172 ✭✭✭✭✭
  • dontdiedontkillanyon
    dontdiedontkillanyon Members Posts: 10,172 ✭✭✭✭✭
    FKA twigs
    LP1
    Young Turks; 2014
    By Philip Sherburne; August 11, 2014
    8.8

    homepage_large.48a48155.jpg

    FKA twigs knows a thing or two about creating an image for herself. Every song she's released so far, even the four from her self-released debut EP from 2012, has been accompanied by its own video. What these may lack in storyboarding, set design, or anything else, really—"Hide" just features her hypnotically stroking an anthurium that adorns her nude midsection—more than make up for in their ability to draw you close, hold you rapt and keep you wondering just who, exactly, this character called twigs might be.

    The British musician and performer born Tahliah Barnett got her start in the pop-industrial complex as a backup dancer in music videos, a career that led, for a spell, to a strange kind of almost-fame—you walk around and you get recognized, but not for being you, necessarily, just for being that girl from the video. And so, she has said, you learn to lie: "No, that's not me. No, I get that a lot." She addresses this situation on her debut album, LP1, with the song "Video Girl". It's actually one of the album's most straightforward songs, but its chorus is unequivocal in its equivocations: "Is she the girl that's from the video?/ You lie and you lie and you lie." And all that artifice, in turn, is a way of making truth out of the lie. Because what is her music, what are her videos, if not an elaborate way of saying, "No, I'm not that girl from the video. This is who I am"?

    She hides in plain sight on the cover of LP1, wearing an expression that's—what? Coy? Distant? What exactly is going on there, beneath those strands of just-so curlicue and that weird, plastic sheen across one slick cheek? And that splash of red, what is that supposed to be—a blush, a bruise, a birthmark? Is she a teenybopper post-popped bubblegum, a cartoon character post-exploding cigar? The image expands upon the subtle surrealism of last year's EP2 cover, where her neck was almost imperceptibly elongated, and the more aggressive post-processing of her "Water Me" video, in which her eyes are enlarged, anime-style, until they threaten to pop like a Panic Pete Squeeze Toy. These tweaks are crucial to twigs' eerie, post-humanist, Uncanny Valley-girl aesthetic.

    More than anything else, the image reminds me of Björk's Alexander McQueen-designed Homogenic cover, in which the Icelandic singer hovered in the middle distance between larger-than-life pop icon and superflat fantasy gloss like a digital scan of a wax figure. Listening to LP1, it's immediately clear that twigs is aiming for similar heights—and easily capable of scaling them. Quiet as it may be, this is a huge album, a monumental debut. On a formal level, it takes the kinds of risks that few pop artists, and few "experimental" artists, for that matter, are willing to take these days. As far as the making of the artist known as FKA twigs goes, it gives us a sense of who she is without shedding any of the mystique she has developed so far.

    Building on her co-produced debut EP with Tic and her Arca-produced EP2, the sound throughout is a crystalline jumble of splinters and shards, of stuttering drum machines cutting against arrhythmic clatter—metronomes winding down, car alarms bleating dully into the night. Her voice, the most awe-inspiring instrument on the album, flits between Auto-Tuned artifice and raw carnality. As an acrobat, she's a natural, but she's not afraid to lean on a little digital enhancement. One minute it's a flash-frozen sigh; the next, it's a melon-balled dollop of flesh. As futuristic as her music is, no single technology dominates. Elastic digital effects brush up against 808s, and icy synth stabs share space with acoustic bass. The common denominator is the crackling sense of dread that persists when the notes go silent and the beat drops out, which is often. The overall effect is that of R&B that has been run through some kind of matter-transporting beam and put together wrong on the other end, full of glitches and hard, jutting artifacts.

    The most obvious reference points, aside from the spectrum of breathy, synth-heavy R&B that stretches from Ciara through the Weeknd and Beyoncé, are first-gen trip-hop acts like Portishead and Tricky, with their charcoal-streaked affect and sumptuous sense of texture. There are also clear links to contemporary UK artists working the margins between R&B and electronic music, like James Blake, the ? , and even Sophie, he of the deconstructed Saturday-morning rave choons. Her own vocal style, or at least her stratospheric range, evokes Kate Bush and even Tori Amos. More provocative, though, is the way she and her producers wrangle a whole host of unlikely references into the mix: "Two Weeks" features blushing chords reminiscent of late Cocteau Twins and a junkyard guitar lead straight out of Tom Waits' Rain Dogs. Even more incongruously, "Two Weeks" cribs a fleeting riff from Air Supply's "All Out of Love."

    At the same time, it's a testament to the strength of her vision that the album is as cohesive as it is, despite having so many producers involved, including Arca, Devonté Hynes, Clams Casino, and Grammy-winning journeyman Emile Haynie (Eminem's Recovery, Lana Del Rey's "Born to Die" and "Blue Jeans," Kanye West's "Runaway"). Sampha helps out on the brittle "Numbers," a Portishead-gone-footwork number that serves as the album's energetic peak, and, perhaps most surprisingly, Paul Epworth (Adele, Coldplay, the Rapture) is responsible for "Pendulum," the album's literal and emotional centerpiece.

    FKA twigs is not a masterful lyricist, at least not yet; some of her couplets feel clunky, like she's grasping in the dark for rhymes and coming up with the objects closest to hand ("If the flame gets blown out and you shine/ I will know that you cannot be mine"). But when she zeroes in on the essence of a thing, she hits hard. The brazen "Two Weeks" features lines as vivid as red welts: "Higher than a ? ", "I can ? you better than her." (The Weeknd only wishes he could make depravity sound so soul-destroyingly desperate.) On top of that, there's a whole thing about pulling out teeth that tips the song into some kind of freaky David Cronenberg territory, making her drugged-up and tied-down fantasies all the more tantalizingly surreal.

    If "Two Weeks" represents the album's sensual core, "Pendulum" is the epicenter of the record's underlying sense of heartbreak, with its glum mantra, "So lonely trying to be yours." Lyrically, the song finds twigs at her most plainspoken—it's a long way off from last year's similarly devastating, but far more cryptic, "Water Me"—so it feels significant that it's one of the album's most sonically out-there songs, with a rhythm built out of what sounds like a roulette wheel run amok and its wash of synthesizers like a sky full of fireflies in death spirals.

    Early in the song, she sings, "Lately I'm not so present now," and the line goes straight to the crux of FKA twigs' whole identity. After all, this is an artist whose name itself suggests a fundamental displacement. Spelled out, it's "Formerly Known As twigs," (no) thanks to the lawyers of some other artist named Twigs. (Barnett earned her nickname from her habit of cracking her joints like dried sticks; is it any wonder her beats are so brittle?) That "FKA" is a way of masking the bigger question mark. Formerly known as, sure. But who is she now? Are you that girl from the video? "I can't recognize me," she sings at the close of "Video Girl", but for the rest of us, with LP1, she's zooming into vivid focus, and it's impossible to look away.

    http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19590-twigs-lp1/
  • lazypakman
    lazypakman Members Posts: 4,913 ✭✭✭✭✭
    pitchfork are dodgy with their reviews but from what i've heard from her so far the comparisons they make are pretty spot on.props on the thread though, i've only heard a few of her tracks randomly, going to check the album out now.

    you got anymore artists like this i should be checking out? i like to keep on top of the UK stuff but lately my game has been slipping.
  • Ishi
    Ishi Members Posts: 4,649 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Loving her music. Ever since i saw the Papi Pacify video I've been hooked.
  • dontdiedontkillanyon
    dontdiedontkillanyon Members Posts: 10,172 ✭✭✭✭✭
    lazypakman wrote: »
    pitchfork are dodgy with their reviews but from what i've heard from her so far the comparisons they make are pretty spot on.props on the thread though, i've only heard a few of her tracks randomly, going to check the album out now.

    you got anymore artists like this i should be checking out? i like to keep on top of the UK stuff but lately my game has been slipping.

    Try Banks. I've read her name a couple of times in comparison to FKA Twigs.
  • KillaCham
    KillaCham Members, Moderators Posts: 11,417 Regulator
    lazypakman wrote: »
    pitchfork are dodgy with their reviews but from what i've heard from her so far the comparisons they make are pretty spot on.props on the thread though, i've only heard a few of her tracks randomly, going to check the album out now.

    you got anymore artists like this i should be checking out? i like to keep on top of the UK stuff but lately my game has been slipping.

    Try Banks. I've read her name a couple of times in comparison to FKA Twigs.
    Banks is pretty good too. Nowhere as experimental as FKA but definitely comparable. The production is what makes a lot of FKA's music but her voice and lyrics hold their own too. It's great. I still have to check out EP1. Can't seem to find it.
  • lazypakman
    lazypakman Members Posts: 4,913 ✭✭✭✭✭
    I know of banks, will explore further.

    This album is on repeat heavy though.some of the tracks definitely have a strong Aaliyah vibe to them.
  • KillaCham
    KillaCham Members, Moderators Posts: 11,417 Regulator
    lazypakman wrote: »
    I know of banks, will explore further.

    This album is on repeat heavy though.some of the tracks definitely have a strong Aaliyah vibe to them.
    http://community.allhiphop.com/discussion/512498/cheri-coke-cheri-dennis-melo-x-x-coke-ep
  • Ishi
    Ishi Members Posts: 4,649 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Banks album been got the pre order treatment.
  • A Talented One
    A Talented One Members Posts: 4,202 ✭✭✭
    The album is dope. Fav tracts are "Two Weeks" and "Give it up."
  • _Goldie_
    _Goldie_ Members, Moderators, Writer Posts: 30,349 Regulator
    Im late, but that lp1 album be crankin
  • Copper
    Copper Members Posts: 49,532 ✭✭✭✭✭
    this ? is wack
  • Chef_Taylor
    Chef_Taylor Members Posts: 26,584 ✭✭✭✭✭
    FKA Twigs...kinda name is that
  • Copper
    Copper Members Posts: 49,532 ✭✭✭✭✭
    ? _Lyfe wrote: »
    First thing I said when I looked at her: "Does Sade have a daughter?"

    Interestingly enough, they have the same birthday.

    this ? doesnt hold a candle to Sade

    ? you hearing?
  • Ghostdenithegawd
    Ghostdenithegawd Members Posts: 16,231 ✭✭✭✭✭
    This ? is wack idk what yall see in this broad
  • Cunt_Lyfe
    Cunt_Lyfe Members, Writer Posts: 3,998 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Copper wrote: »
    ? _Lyfe wrote: »
    First thing I said when I looked at her: "Does Sade have a daughter?"

    Interestingly enough, they have the same birthday.

    this ? doesnt hold a candle to Sade

    ? you hearing?

    Never did I say they were on the same level in terms of sonic sound.

    I'm talking about the physical, not musically.
  • PILL_COSBY
    PILL_COSBY Members Posts: 6,374 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited November 2014
    This chick >>>>>>>>>>
    But this chick >>>>>> both of them. She got a nice ass haunting voice. She killed this ? .
    RZA sampled this