Like regions, genres have accents. There are pop-punk yelps, post-punk groans, dream-pop whispers, and the clean, enunciated croons of mainstream stars. Katie Dey's first album asdfasdf positions her as an alien to vocal geography. The Melbourne-based artist is a singer as well as a songwriter, but in each of her songs, she completely corrodes her voice. While many home recordings paint the image of the artist singing real words into a real microphone attached to a real tape recorder, asdfasdf refuses to ground itself. It is hard to imagine these seven songs coming from a physical space; chaotic and gritty, they prioritize energy and motion, making audio fidelity feel like an obsolete concern.
Of Dey's peers on the Orchid Tapes label, she finds the closest kinship with Alex G, another purveyor of demented indie pop who makes resourceful use of pitch-shifting and bizarre instrumental choices. But women's voices in music are especially policed for annoyingness, and Dey pushes that quality to an extreme edge. The first you hear of her on "don't be scared" is a high-pitched croak processed beyond recognition among clean acoustic guitar riffs and unsteady drum beats. She later programs a synthesizer to mimic her vocal tone; aside from the vague definition around her words, the line between human and machine feels smeared and unstable, as if Dey were as present in all of her instruments as she is in her own voice.
asdfasdf's most defined and energetic song comes in the form of "unkillable", a minute and 20 seconds of buoyant melodies that constantly threaten to veer off course. Dey's lyrics shine through clearest here, with phrases like "teen poetry" and "sucks the blood from my feet" flashing through in strange, disembodied glimpses. The song is catchy, which makes it all the stranger. Most hooks go down smooth by design, but Dey's nightmare pop forces you to swallow something decomposing and sharp. The name of the song suggests its own inversion—not "unlikable", as it may read on first glance, but immortal, unstoppable, powerful.
Dey is hardly the first songwriter to use broken rules as weapons, but she takes palpable pleasure in the conventions she upends. Voices, especially women's, are expected to be pretty and easy to grasp, especially in quieter, gentler music. Dey amplifies her rough edges, splitting the space inside her tape machine and chasing herself down its fragments. asdfasdf sustains a level of textural complexity that most musicians won't attempt, and its clever melodic core supports the layers of abrasions. A warm playfulness radiates from deep inside Dey's music. Its inscrutability makes it all the more rewarding to wade through over and over again.
