Tahliah Barnett, who looks something of an art-school alien, first descended into the tellurian realm as a Grimes incarnate: girl with space-cadet aesthetics turned one-woman powerhouse. twig’s status as Robert Pattinson’s new beau, her paint-smeared, caricatured album cover, and inclination for the grotesque have a way of garnering the important questions. Who is she? Is the breadth of her facial expressions as vast as that of Kristen Stewart? While the latter is still subject to speculation, it can be rightfully said that twigs is a musician like none other. At first glance, the coalescing facets of her first full-length album appear unremarkable. The rudimentary lyrics, somewhat unremarkable. The very title of the record, LP1, wholly unremarkable. Then what exactly makes FKA twigs so, well, remarkable?
The vocal range: ethereal, grappling for the unknown, almost interrupting synaptic pulses. The motifs: brazen, torching the usual euphemisms, probing into the feminine consciousness. As Barnett gasps and warbles through her lecherous bedroom tales, we find the gritty traces of desperation, traces of the things that are otherwise left unsaid in music. Her nudge at libido begins with “Preface,” a soft-spoken gospel tethered to the laser-beam zooms of a rocket ship. twigs then makes her way through the celestial grottoes of “Pendulum” that echo her harrowing pleas to a boy: “So lonely trying to be yours/When you're looking for so much more.” After a series of zero-gravity synth patterns, plunging and rising almost erratically with her staccato, she brings us to the throbbing nucleus of the album, “Two Weeks,” and writes a universal text message to ex-boyfriends that, in reality, only persists in a typed-but-never-sent limbo: “Give me two weeks, you won’t recognize her.” In the age of Fourth Wave feminism, watched over by the caryatids of Queen Bey, what woman dares to host a séance of heartbreak, beckoning the half-orgasm, half-whisper of a ghost that haunts the bedrooms of old lovers? FKA twigs does. Suddenly bereft of “him,” she dares, she openly laments, she brings a certain Don Juanism to the table and that, that is remarkable.
