Last week, Jessy Lanza livestreamed a performance-slash-DJ set. Nothing unusual in that, of course. You currently can’t move for artists, producers and DJs whipping out their cameras and video encoders, either to promote their new releases or earn a few quid in lieu of lost revenue. And yet, amid a sea of similar online events, Lanza stood out. She performed in the back of what looked like a people carrier. Its boot opened to reveal the Canadian producer sitting cross-legged, surrounded by electronic equipment and two disco lights, the latter the kind of thing you buy from Argos for a six-year-old’s birthday party. Thin clouds of dry ice wafted forth, which failed to add an air of atmospheric mystery: it looked like Lanza was suffering from both engine trouble and faulty air-con. She played pounding footwork, deep house, a ferocious example of Bristol producer Addison Groove’s take on Chicago juke and sang a few songs from her third album, All the Time, their sweetness at odds with the pounding minimalism of her other musical selections. Then she shut the boot. Livestream over.
It was a performance as charmingly odd and idiosyncratic as the musical space Lanza and her collaborator Jeremy Greenspan have carved out over the last seven years. Pegged at first as British bass label Hyperdub’s contribution to the early 2010s wave of alt-R&B singers, Lanza turned out to be a different proposition to the artists initially assumed to be her peers. Her last album, 2016’s Oh No, decisively broke away from the future soul template, offering up a strange, enticing jumble of sounds – 80s boogie, Shangaan electro, disco house, footwork, 90s slow jams, the electronic experimentation of Yellow Magic Orchestra – distilled into something that was simultaneously danceable, experimental and pop-facing all at once. Critically acclaimed, it offered a vision of 21st-century pop as a world of wonkily eclectic possibility, rather than a series of rules and trends to be slavishly adhered to.
Four years and a relocation to New York later, Lanza takes a step closer to the mainstream with All the Time. If its contents frequently sound as if they’re being beamed from an entirely different galaxy to the contents of the singles chart – as evidenced by Face’s spacey assemblage of cut-up vocal samples, minimal electro beats and Lanza’s voice, manipulated until her scattered interjections are incomprehensible – the songwriting is largely more straightforward than on Lanza’s previous albums, its warping of sound more subtle. Slow jam Badly is gently unsettled by the way the backing vocals start crowding out Lanza’s lead and by some jazzy synth chords that stick out from the melody at peculiar tangents, lending the otherwise beatific mood an undercurrent of unease.
Lanza’s embrace of a more upfront melodic sensibility reaches a fabulous peak on Lick in Heaven. It essentially sounds like a mid-80s pop-R&B hit – Janet Jackson wouldn’t have turned her nose up at the melody – refracted through a modern lens: tellingly, a recent mix by Lanza featured Alexander O’Neal and the SOS Band among the cutting-edge dancefloor tracks. A weird electronic effect gives her airy, unshowy vocal a robotic sheen, the music is sparse and influenced by the world of post-dubstep bass, but the chorus is a stubborn earworm. The moment when it crashes back in after the beat fades out entirely, leaving silence punctuated by a sprinkling of mournful electronic scribbles, is joyous. Over and Over repeats the trick: a fantastic melody, and a sound that judders along – driven, improbably enough, by the hi-hat of the rhythm track, whacked up loud in the mix – before collapsing into a lengthy beat-less drift and gradually reassembling itself.
All the Time is filled with tracks that get the delicate balance right between experimentation and a love of an uncomplicated pop tune; between nostalgia for the past and a dedication to sounding like the future. Baby Love strands Lanza’s voice – and another obstinately clingy chorus – above a backing that’s barely there: no bass, just a beat that echoes as if playing in a vast, empty room, with occasional smears of synth. Anyone Around and Like Fire are just great songs, subtly decorated with diverting strangeness – yelps and vocal snatches that recall the rudimentary sampling of early Chicago house and an unexpected but euphoric blast of bubbling electronics on the former; spectral whispers of falsetto vocals weaving around the latter.
You can imagine them as hits in a world where the charts are less inclined to rules and trends: as it is, you suspect, Lanza will have to content herself with cult success and the knowledge that she’s created a fascinating alternate pop universe of her own. Lounging in the front seat of the aforementioned people carrier on All the Time’s cover, she looks happy enough where she is.
This week Alexis listened to
Momus: Oblivion
From an album of songs inspired by coronavirus, the veteran provocateur offers as incisive, angry and darkly funny a portrait of life in lockdown as has yet been produced: “Like your worst holiday.”
