While her lyrics have always contained a cut-up quality reminiscent of Burroughs or Acker, each of her solo albums has lent them a sonic spine. For as much of a fuss was made about her speaking over trap beats on 2024’s The Collective, its industrial rap core felt like a natural progression of the bass-heavy noise rock featured on 2021’s No Home Record. In both cases, they presented late-career Gordon as a formal experimentalist. Deconstructing and reshaping genre around her sputtering mix of no-wave crunch and grim cyberpunk visions. Play Me lacks that clear genre throughline. Abandoning the easily categorisable for a shifting soundscape that reflects uncategorisable times.
There’s still plenty of her unique strain of rap rock lingering across the record. Tracks like "Dirty Tech" and "BLACKOUT" see her deploy her singular drawl over skittering tap beats, though now with a cloudier synth-heavy sound. "SQUARE JAW" recalls Memphis rap with its skittering repeated vocal samples, and "POST EMPIRE" dances close to trip hop with its gloomy atmosphere. The Collective’s core sound of noise-trap has been abandoned, Gordon’s guitar appearing more subtly. Instead, percussion, synths, and samples take the lead, creating a sound displaced from much of what Gordon’s done before. It works beautifully; her voice, removed from its typical noise, takes on an ominous quality. Her breaths bleed tension, often more haunting than commanding. Her lack of traditional flow, if anything, enhances it. Her voice sounds slightly out of place; it almost works against the beat. Not to the extent of irritation, thankfully. At its best, its spectral quality causes the album's distorted vision of trap and rap to resemble Suicide and much else of no-wave's take on rock. Her distorted vocals emerge and submerge against dissonant guitar and dancey beats, she sounds like a ghost trapped in the machine.
But Play Me is at its most interesting when
removed from an easy genre. The title track flows like a piece of
bizarre jazz-pop, Gordon’s vocals uncoiling around a chilled sax loop
and skittered drums. "Girl With A Look" feels like a subdued goth
banger, motorik drums pulsing underneath dramatic darkwave synths. But "Not Today" might be among Gordon's finest moments, its distorted guitar
breaking into a hypnagogic haze over krautrock drums as Gordon lays out
a painfully emotive performance. All the desire of PJ Harvey and Lydia
Lunch is there, but with an aged quality that lends a sense of struggle
and perseverance.
It’s still rare that Gordon sounds aged, like every step of this near-decade-long output with producer Justin Raisen Play Me
finds new edges within the contemporary. Rendering, trap, trip-hop, and
even country riffs on "POST EMPIRE", into disconcerting cyberpunk
slurry. Her list-like lyrics and droning delivery, merging with Raisen’s
dystopic production to nail the frictionless abstraction of
contemporary culture. But still, whether it’s a particular melodic
strain or the way a synth aches out under a beat, the emotions remain.
