Me Lost Me – RPG

Upset The Rhythm

Jayne Dent’s (the person behind Me Lost Me) voice is incredible, but this isn’t immediately obvious from the albums opener “Real World”. An ambient introduction of birdsong and news snippets dusting a smokey melody, its chirruping curls of wordless vocal only hinting at the songworthy delights yet to come.

The arresting joy that is “Eye Witness” quickly addressing this. A tasty portion of alt-folk-pop that thrusts Jayne’s golden voice front and centre, her words rainbowing over a bubble burst of bouncy ball beat and rhythmic skip, to perspective-spin on clustering grins of woodwind and other peculiar perambulations.

Cutting to the more traditionally dashed “Festive Day”, she weevils a folkish yarn to cello and sparsely skittering electronics. The saturate is sustained, bendy, then the drone clearing to a vocal caught on ballerina-like slivers of musicality. Sonically sabled goodness that the purring percussive pop-tasticness of “Heat” takes to a whole new level. An elasticated chipped china, walnut-whipped in sprightly nuanced wordplay and a voodoo vex of claps. A slippery Pumajaw-like confection that animal-skins the scenics beautifully, burns behind the eyes like an nouveau primitive.

Striping it all back to the comfortably unadorned “Mirie It Is While Summer I Last” is a showcase of pure vocal. A doubled polyphonic stretching the space between its medieval origin and the now, bleeding beautifully into the chantry of “The God of Stuck Time”.

The most haunting song on the album forces things bang up to date, laments the multiplayer dreamless sleep of gamer zombies to fluctuating drone and corroded glitches and somnambulistics that bathe her words in a forty-watt glow. “Malware for the mind”, she remarks, mocking our algorithmic haggled lives. “Every one is here”, she states wearily, adding “at the shrine of stuck time”, her voice melancholic, persuasively weighted to the sorrowful state of things, requiem floating to a chorusing pagoda.

Confidently understated, every track holds to that metered voice, and the words that butterfly from it. Effect-seasoned snippets that cacti with flavoursome suggestion quicksilvered in that subtle economy of sound.

Her over-singing of squeezebox tapers and seesawing sibulants on “In Garden” are ace, like an effect-smeared spell whispering your ear coated in Piano Magic-like lustres. The Meredith Monkish experiments on “Collide” abreast light-hearted reedplay and humph-alogical pipings, feel like they’re tapping in to the celebratory fun of some ancient festival.

Each track here delights, amalgams an oddness that shifts from traditional a capella to folk-saturated pop with ease. The sensual strangeness of “Until Morning” strobing in swollen instrumental tensions and slippery moss-covered stone, its pagan sensibilities re-contextualising our modern times. A disquieting balance that the soft-tempoed pop of “Science And Art” escapes from, ends the album in percussive handclaps, finds her voice spiralling a wavering completeness that promotes plenty of album replay.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-