In today’s politicised cultural landscape, albums about The State of Things aren’t exactly in short supply. But few address these calamitous times with as much wit and menace as Kim Gordon on her debut solo record. You could say she has an unfair advantage – her charred voice is instantly recognisable, conveying such a natural sense of absurdity and contempt that it could make a harvest festival reading sound like an indictment of the entire agricultural complex. Though that would underestimate the skill and potency of her writing: when she seethes “Airbnb, come set me free!” on a song named after the company, her poisonous yet euphoric gasp indicates the toxic convenience of the sharing economy. That it’s one of the year’s best rock songs, gasping and visceral, girds its dark appeal.
Gordon is known as a member of Sonic Youth, then half of the improv noise group Body/Head with Bill Nace, but Justin Raisen, her primary collaborator here, could be her best ally. Too many reviews of difficult, leftfield music will falsely plead its “pop sensibilities”, but No Home Record brilliantly weds noise textures to pop dynamics. Hungry Baby is dogged, riotous punk that tosses Gordon’s fragmented observations of music industry harassment (“touch your nipple! Pretend you’re mine!”) above the fray; Murdered Out swaggers and careens around her untrammelled wail. When it leans more quietly, the arrangements still feel sculptural and surprising: the shuddering bass and menacing declamations of Sketch Artist suddenly yield to moments of glimmering reprieve.
These treacherous soundscapes underpin Gordon’s writing about the false promise of convenience and the slipperiness of identity. Don’t Play It touches on how transient selfhood can feel when pegged to consumerism (“Where are my cigarettes, those aren’t my brand”). Its insistently spat title, coupled with production that sounds like brutal techno heard through a wall, tantalisingly out of reach, gets at the futility of trying to cling on to the past. That would be the opposite of Gordon’s artistic MO. Many artists of her stature retreat from contemporary horrors to the comforts of the past, but Gordon relishes new raw material to remake in her own, inimitable image.
