LONELADY - Nerve Up

In a historical moment of near-irreversible economic downturn and recession, the limping behemoth of the British record industry has, for some years now, thought it wise to patch up its battered balance sheets by betting (almost) everything on a very long parade of female faces and voices that, from Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen, has landed on the media phenomenon of Florence + The Machine, passing through the likes of Adele, Little Boots, Duffy and Kate Nash. A research path into which even the glorious Sheffield imprint Warp has decided to sink a few sounding pounds. And since an oblique, cerebrally sophisticated record label like Warp could, almost by definition, never come up with anything less than a brilliant idea - always ready to catch us by surprise, taking us somewhere we'd never have imagined - the result of this latest operation could only turn out to be equally excellent and subtly ineffable, like so many other bets the British stable has won hands down in the recent past (from Grizzly Bear to Battles, by way of Maximo Park).

A protégée of post-punk theorist Paul Morley, Julie Campbell is a restless Manchester girl with short hair and a face kept in half-shadow, who learned very early on that she'd have to dance alone. Her mercurial debut, "Nerve Up", has the hypertense sound (almost to the point of pure logical vaporization, as "Immaterial" so aptly puts it), rendered with exposed nerves, of a cold fusion gone into permanent short-circuit between Kylie Minogue and Gang Of Four, Talking Heads and the Slits, or else between Durutti Column and ESG.

Small, luminous, sharp-edged nuggets like "Early The Haste Comes", "Marble" or "Army" use the pointed graphite of a surgically implacable wave guitar to sketch out ossified, tubular shapes, arithmetic grids in which the square root of a post-punk-funk multiplied by itself to infinity composes and launches into space origami figures of sound that are at once identical and different, in whose unpredictable interplay the imagination loses and finds itself again, in an endlessly guaranteed rotation of meanings.

For now, then, all that's left to do is greet with surprise and genuine enjoyment the peremptory arrival on the scene of this atypical, singular character, confident that her multi-perspective vision of rock science, forever tilted at an angle, will reward us in the days ahead with flashes of truly great insight.

Ride the wave of great music

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19/04/2010