Phew‘s New Decade strips it all away, orbits the sultry sizzle of fragmented abstracts and of course Hiromi Moritani’s vocal dynamics that magnetically grab-bag.
Born in the pandemic, the album’s whispering contours were a result of wishing to not annoy the neighbours too much, an oh-so-quiet verve that’s best suited to and appreciated on headphones.
Its opener “Snow And Pollen” is brilliant, tattoos your head with eerie wonder as her words and repeated phrases tiptoe through the torn tulips of blue and orange spark, those eeling electronics that dart’n’dive the haiku, piano-pearl the tension like swooping bats. “Days Nights” sees the intimate nocturnes of the previous track besmirched in Casio auto-run and snare smart, her reverbed repeats drawn through its shingle to create a strange disco. Guessing the neighbours were out for this one, as it certainly piles on the decibels as Phew yells from within its spattering rhythmics and hydra-heads the timeline.The drone-backed “Into The Stream” that follows skips to absent-minded intones that pucker the pyrotechnics like an uneasy erythema. Discordant glances and distorted strings shift the dynamics, become delinquent chromatics that lose their shape to the overpowering whiff of voodoo cursives that her cries suddenly flatline into withering shadows.
A brilliant track that leads to the eye-opening sluice gates of “Feedback Tuning” that mouthwashes a queasy Throbbing Gristle-esque romance to which she convulsively arches, is texturally whipped and hit to yelping response. The odd pang of synth menaces the space as nightmares come home to roost, and her absent-minded lullaby and pain is overcome in ripping cartilage details that really pop, seductively seed.As with a lot of Phew’s past work, New Decade glows headphonically, antagonises the space beautifully before the vocal-less energy of “Flashforward” crudely scuppers with a humming dronechild besieged in numb-planked percussives and shrill locust waves. The diode dialling is space-age texturally rasterised, the sines sheared and machine stamped, a rub that deliberately roughs up the bewitchment, messes with the synthesised aftersun of “Doing Nothing”.
Here is a Casio pebbling that brittly derails, then spanner-throws the aesthetics further in a wrecking ball of occasional self-sabotage and a brutalist bit of radio interference that tears into the tranquilly to tumour in vapourising vocals. It’s a finality that leaves you with more questions than it does answers, and I’m guessing that’s the very state Phew prefers to opiate.
New Decade is a very personal beast, an experience that conspires to create its own truth, and ultimately leaves you to join up the dots.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
