Where do broken-out artists go? Ask duo iamamiwhoami, who've gotten an idea. The project had an unusual roll-out. In December 2009, a video emerged from nothing, followed by a few more. Each was striking in its mystery. They were short, a minute or so each of slow clips: the sort of forest where murders happen; a muddied woman looking and acting as reptilian as possible; silhouettes of owls and goats; various substances oozing. They came off like horror films, but the atmospheric sort where the queasy imagery provides all the scare. Each was scored to chilly, vaguely creepy synthpop; each was flagrantly anonymous. The track titles were just strings of numbers, and the project name all but taunted viewers to guess an identity. They did, en masse, naming seemingly anyone arty, Scandinavian, or blond: Karin Dreijer, Björk, Goldfrapp, Lady Gaga. (At one point Christina Aguilera looked like a frontrunner, which is now hilarious.) Bloggers were mailed locks of hair and chunks of wood. Viewers spent hours comparing faces and analyzing messages with cryptographers' fervor. The music hit iTunes, right on schedule. Everything was set for a big reveal.
That was 2010, and the reveal happened soon enough, though it's not overly revelatory. The vocalist is Jonna Lee, a Swedish folkie of not much prior note, produced by Claes Björklund, whose credits mainly included Lee, other folkies, and electronic but tranquil sorts like Azure Blue. If the names were surprising, it was only because they'd been on almost nobody's radar before this. Lee and Björklund continued to release videos, and later full songs. But their initial excitement-- a sort of musical alternate reality game that arguably influenced later acts like the Weeknd with highly stylized, highly anonymous debuts-- inevitably waned with time, as viral projects unfailingly do. It all provides enough material for one of those protracted debates about authenticity (an opaque sonic, aesthetic, and identity makeover from little-noticed stuff? Sounds familiar), reach (a standard Jonna Lee album probably wouldn’t have escaped the Scandinavian music sphere without luck or prime positioning), and evolving distribution methods (self-explanatory), but that time has passed. Now we have an album.
Kin is billed as an audiovisual project-- videos were released for every song over the year, designed to be viewed in order, and the album was released with an accompanying DVD. But as was probably inevitable, they're far less compelling as a cohesive story than as a set of clues. A summary: Lee, half-dressed, gets kidnapped by yetis, taken over hill and dale and sea and rooms blank enough for Terry Richardson, dancing as she goes, and becomes a black cube somehow. The end. It's interpretive dance without interpretation, and anything the videos do to enhance the project has been done already, as preview material. At this point, Kin stands or falls on its songs alone. Fortunately, that mostly works.
It takes a little calibration to listen to Kin as a proper album, but it's doable. The distribution might have been unconventional, but the division of labor is familiar enough: Lee's voice, distorted and processed like Dreijer and her now-countless acolytes, and Björklund's production, lush and nuanced. "Sever" is distant and downtempo; the instrumentation even comes with accompanying rainfall. "Drops", "Goods", and "Good Worker" are straightforward dance tracks, sweetened with chiming keyboard lines; the last even has equally straightforward conceit ("who am I, when all I am is your designated wife?"). "In Due Order" is seething and almost industrial, as if Austra re-recorded one of lead singer Katie Stelmanis' edgier solo tracks. "Idle Talk" is an anthemic love track kept dormant; at least three times, you can hear Lee try to launch a soaring chorus over the moody synth bass and skewed structure. She succeeds on "Play", the closest thing here to a proper lead single and as close to R&B as this genre typically allows-- it's not hard to imagine someone like AlunaGeorge recording it-- but lurching, woozy. "I cannot move to my own beat," Lee sings, more languid than necessary, "but I can dance tonight... and to your rhythm I will shout my love for play"-- at which point her voice twirls off into wordless Liz Fraser curlicues, meter by the wayside. It's not hopeful, exactly-- the lyrics are too self-negating for that-- but it's among the most purely joyful moments of the year.
Kin isn't perfect-- Lee's lyrics tend toward the opaque, and Björklund's arrangements toward the meandering. (The video, meanwhile, is almost entirely so, on both counts.) But it's not anticlimactic, which is impressive considering its long gestation period and the fact that half these songs have been out for months. Kin is not an assertive album, nor is it surprising, but it's as solid an aesthetic as you can expect of two artists mostly new to this genre. Lee and Björklund have established that they can make headlines. Kin establishes they can craft songs, too.
