John Glacier’s debut studio album, Like a Ribbon, arrives with all of the laudatory press (“maybe one of the London-defining artists of her period”) that comes baked right into a launch on Younger, two years after she was featured, standing in entrance of Large Ben, in Daniel Lee’s first marketing campaign for Burberry. It liberally references each the trendy post-punk rasp of London’s up to date pop underground and the cool-kid digital music that’s outlined Younger and sister label XL within the twenty first century.
Many would wither in this sort of warmth, however London-born Glacier is fabricated from sturdier stuff. For all its familiarity—on each a musical and narrative degree—Like a Ribbon is lush and engrossing, the uncommon Large Indie debut that outstrips its personal hype. A number of this may be chalked as much as Glacier herself: She is a resolute, unflappable vocalist with a deep, unyielding deadpan that bleeds throughout the web page. Though Like a Ribbon options producers as disparate as Flume, Evilgiane, and Kwes Darko, Glacier’s presence is a unifying pressure; like a Chantal Akerman protagonist, she floats by means of her environments with an unshowy magnetism, subtly shifting the ambiance round her as she goes.
Like a Ribbon seems like a time lapse in album kind, with Glacier’s largely arhythmic deadpan the one fixed. Though she raps about events, relationships, and her profession, Glacier’s most indelible photographs come from peering on the fringe of the body. On “Discovered,” she zeroes in on “new inexperienced grass the place the grass by no means knew,” a poignant, small-scale image of renewal; the crunchy post-punk monitor “Cash Reveals” ends with a picture of summer time melting into autumn, a stark perspective shift after a track concerning the frantic lifetime of a working musician. Though she’s keen to have interaction within the occasional Sizzling Younger Rapper trope (“You finest imagine it, I’m the most popular within the recreation,” she raps on the twinkly rave monitor “Feelings”), Glacier all the time inevitably wanders again towards the pure world, an important pressure in her music. If there’s an aesthetic push-pull on the coronary heart of Like a Ribbon—between the simplicity of Glacier’s supply and the relative busyness of her manufacturing—it’s one which echoes the connection between the pure world and the town, one aspect providing respite and the opposite pleasure.
Though Glacier is—not incorrectly—categorised as a rapper by most, there’s a looseness to that tag that she fortunately exploits throughout Like a Ribbon. Over the dusty electrical guitar that opens “Satellites,” she sounds a little bit like King Krule; delivering one thing near a sing-song cadence on “Feelings,” you possibly can hear the faintest echo of early M.I.A. And a variety of the album recollects Dean Blunt’s stuttering indie-post-punk-rap, in addition to the work of his collaborators, like Mica Levi, Inga Copeland, and Tirzah. The economic chug that powers “Dwelling” feels of a bit with Levi and Tirzah’s work on the stark, aching trip9love…???.
