Karen O - Crush Songs

Karen O

Crush Songs

9 September 2014

Cult

 

1.5 stars out of 5

 

 

Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O has released her first solo LP, Crush Songs, featuring fifteen lo-fi recordings that zip by in twenty-five minutes. For the most part the album sounds like it was recorded on an old analogue cassette recorder, the kind where you have to press down the “play” and “record” buttons simultaneously in order to record into the built-in condenser microphone. The arrangements consist primarily of O’s vocals and former YYYs touring musician Imaad Wasif’s acoustic guitar, with occasional smatterings of primitive drum machine and backing vocal overdubs.

 

The songs, though? Brief, sparse, haunted, and very unfinished. One gets the feeling that Crush Songs represents O’s home demos (allegedly these were written and recorded in 2006 and 2007) of songs she had written for YYYs that never got used, or perhaps for a full-fledged solo album that never materialized. Unlike Nebraska, O never went into the studio to record proper versions of these songs, ultimately deciding to discard the more polished versions in favour of the demos. These seem to be literally just things she had sitting around, and when Julian Casablancas came around asking for something to release on his new label, rather than devote time to making a decent effort, she just gave him these. There’s no excuse for this. O has money, prestige, famous friends, and an Oscar nomination. She could easily get studio time and talented people to help her if she wanted to.

 

There are tracks here (“Rapt,” “NYC Baby”) that would be very solid if the artist took the time to take them seriously. I, myself, have hundreds of things like these sitting around, sketches of songs made quickly with acoustic guitar and voice performed (if I may use the term loosely) into a single shitty microphone, but I have the good sense to realize that I would be wasting everyone’s time and money (including my own) by throwing fifteen of them together on an LP and inflicting them upon the public. No, O’s tunes are not cool, vital, or legit because they are lo-fi. No, they are not an important insight into the artist’s creative process. Crush Songs is the musical equivalent of a poet throwing a bunch of unedited, uninteresting crap into the photocopier and folding and stapling it into a poorly made chapbook, expecting that the world will forgive the content, effort, and finished product and proclaim her to be a genius anyway.

 

reviewed by Richard Krueger