When I first heard Switcheroo, the debut album for Los Angeles-via-Boise songwriter Angel Abaya under the name Gelli Haha, I knew exactly where I’d want to hear these songs live. There’s a dance club in an industrial corridor on the east side of Cleveland that opened in place of a now-shuttered Croatian dive called crobar; mavericks of the electronic underground increasingly skip the overly glitzed downtown clubs to show off here for the heads. There’s a rusty punk edge that makes the place feel less Instagram, more human. Abaya’s synth-pop could be described similarly—as much as her bright blue eyeshadow and haunted kids’ TV aesthetic could appear gimmicky, nothing on Switcheroo feels overproduced. Abaya’s disorienting approach to electronic music has both edge and softness—call it Magdalena Bay for people who grew up on Mark Mothersbaugh. It’s a promising debut.
Switcheroo is a dance party of primary colors, Electrix effects, and strange samples (did you hear the bear attack on the back half of “Dynamite”?) that emerged through Abaya’s careful songwriting and a love of twisted disco shared with co-producer Sean Guerin of De Lux. Together, they warp dance and synth-pop with a post-punk gloom that underscores Abaya’s aestheticized and verbalized absurdity. It makes a song like “Spit” sound deadly serious, sometimes approaching the intensity of Boy Harsher, but once you dive into the lyrics, you realize it’s a sequence of S-words uttered seemingly at random (repeating the word “Surrender,” though, is ominous). “Normalize” has a similar entropy, as Abaya lists rhymes in dulcet tones: “Anesthesia / Euthanasia / Homophobia / Hemophilia / Diphtheria / Arrhythmia / Cornucopia / Pedophilia.” It sounds like clanging, the mental looping phenomenon explored on rapper Emily Allan’s album of the same name. Clanging is un-free association, a space where the poetic resonance of rhyme grows from a funny coincidence into gospel. Even to an observer firmly tethered to the ground, clanging can produce feelings of obvious disorientation but a nagging sense of interrelatedness.
But, where Allan locates clanging as a manifestation of psychosis, Abaya dances with it as part of an effort to navigate familiar torments. Pummeling opener “Funny Music” sees her declaring herself funny as she requests your active participation in the clown-audience dyad. What glimpse of pathetic artifice or defensiveness we get is over before we know it with a “BONK.” Then there’s “Tiramisu,” an uptempo thumper with sandpaper vocals where Abaya stretches the title to reveal, “Tear, I miss you,” before hollering out: “I wanna touch, I wanna scream, I wanna know everything.” Insecurity, exasperation, and conflict aren’t just for the edgy production choices (again, that bear attack); they’re essential to Abaya’s songwriting. Where she once shared such meditations through pensive indie rock, throwing them through the prism of the “Gelliverse” between more inscrutable takes gives them a little more weight. It’s proof that you can’t get away from them no matter how many friends you invite over for trampoline misadventures, puppetry theatrics, or color-blocking makeovers.
“Piss Artist” is the kind of outrageous success that makes what’s ordinarily banal—listening to someone’s off-color party story—exhilarating. ”Oh my God, did I tell you about that one time that, like, I peed in a glass jar, like, in a room full of my friends?” Abaya asks, before meditating on the essential coolness of her friend Dana and stumbling over her words (“The floor is on the bed”) and laughing it off. There’s a “hottie with big tits and nipple piercings,” commonly known as “The Emerald Lady,” who inspires everyone to take their shirts off. Synths undulate while her vocals take on a dreamlike reverb; it sounds like someone replaying Abaya’s pee story in their head, recalling every word and every cadence because it’s too good to forget. Nine times out of ten, a story like that mostly just sounds like a veiled cry for help, but on “Piss Artist,” it sounds like an epic tale.
As Gelli Haha, Angel Abaya threads the needle between goofy and edgy to craft a punk-laden synth-pop debut that’s danceable and vulnerable. Abaya’s voice is incandescent, and whether she throws it up to the high heavens or chuckles between words that coalesce into a dirty story, she’s not one to hide what she can do. When she’s silly, she’s serious about being silly, and when she’s serious, she’s sure to add some outrageous element that relieves some of that tension. Where other electronic acts lean into post-punk for sensuous intensity, Gelli Haha is committed to fun, and there’s plenty of fun to be found in the gurgling and boinging of vintage synthesizers. She’s not afraid to look like a fool, but she’s not forcing your hand into believing she’s funny, freaky, or otherwise extraordinary. What makes Gelli Haha so promising is her balanced humanity. Her insecurities are recognizable, and so is her humor. Switcheroo is heavy on earworms, full of surprises, and disarmingly genuine.
Devon Chodzin is a Pittsburgh-based critic and urban planner with bylines at Aquarium Drunkard, Stereogum, Bandcamp Daily and more. He can be found on social media, sometimes.
