Some years ago, my boyfriend invented what I believe to be the greatest dinner party game of all time. Ideally meant for drunken shouting across a large table, “Real Freak/Fake Freak” distinguishes between true weirdos and well-adjusted people who wear their eccentricities like a bag of chips on their heads. You begin with universal claims (Brian Wilson, RIP, was a Real Freak; Frank Zappa was a Fake Freak) and progress until everyone feels emboldened to try to outdo one another. These fights can range from the historical (Yoko Ono: RF/The Beatles: FF), to the controversial (Courtney Love: RF/Kurt Cobain: FF), to the ones that would get you murdered by Brazilian teenagers online (Redacted/Redigido), going on until you’ve exhausted your vocal cords from screaming with or at each other. There is nothing inherently good or bad about being a freak, but the game does speak to how an audience squares life and art, and how convincing a musician can be at phrasing their humanity through their strangeness.
Given her goofy stage persona and children’s-party-on-acid aesthetic, Angel Abaya readily invites this question. She started off playing things relatively straight, performing with bands in Idaho, working for local arts organizations, and releasing an album of dusky folk rock under her government name. But after moving to Los Angeles and linking up with Sean Guerin of De Lux, she underwent a major makeover. As Gelli Haha, the singer stakes a claim to the club’s weird corners, marrying disco and house-pop to a strain of surreal humor that hews closer to PeeWee’s Playhouse than to polyester genre imitation. On Switcheroo, Gelli Haha’s new album, she raises a big top large enough to contain stoned revelation, gross-out humor, and a stockpile of bizarro sound effects. With its riotously fun production and full-barreled commitment to silliness, Switcheroo does more than earn its freak card: It firmly establishes Abaya as a brilliant young talent to watch.
Contrary to her stage name, Abaya is less interested in being funny (haha) than she is in using disco’s pull and release to dance this mess around. Her songs are panoramic in an off-kilter way, tracing odd circles around fraught feelings without ever leaving the dancefloor. Opener “Funny Music” considers the psychological push and pull of being a clown in the form of a dialectic—more enjoyable than it sounds! Over a surging Moroder beat, the artist alternates between a heartfelt yearning to be laughed at and soft-spoken disavowals that she’s only joking. As the song builds to a climax, she puts her foot down firmly on the side of sincerity by making a massive, aching arch out of the plea: “I’m funnyyyyyy!” The desperation is unmistakable, but so too is the message: She may be weird as hell, but from here on out, defensiveness will have no place in Gelli Haha’s universe.
As the party kicks off, mixed emotions bubble to the fore. On the springy synth-pop of “Bounce House,” Abaya cycles through nursery rhymes so breezily that you almost miss that she’s left a failing relationship behind in the process. “Tiramisu” is pure pleasure until the singer begins emphasizing the title’s last two syllables: “miss you.” As its overblown house beat continues pounding, Abaya’s voice becomes ragged and out of step—until, like a child who’s spun around after eating too much cake, she finally screams her exasperation out loud. “Pluto is not a planet it’s a restaurant” is the record’s ecstatic peak, but as the beat surges, her heart sinks, singing “I’m afraid” as the beat lifts off into the heavens. Rather than channel disco’s full-bodied catharsis, Abaya chases a stream of consciousness through boredom, non-sequiturs, and woozy altered states.
The ultimate example of this approach comes halfway through the album. You’d be forgiven for assuming that the titular “Piss Artist” is either Andres Serrano or Andy Warhol, but surprise! It’s the singer herself! Turning an account of the time she peed in a jar at a house party into a druggy epic, the artist’s intoxicated rambling is set to a minimal beat bookended by a sassy, strutting chorus. Few things in this world are more tedious than listening to a stoned person spill their guts, but the song is a blast: the product of Abaya’s excellent comic timing and cheeky production touches that underline and heighten her queasy grip on reality. When she mixes up nouns in one line (“the floor is on the bed”) her laughter suddenly doubles back and multiplies, chuckling maniacally to herself as the walls seem to melt around her.
Gleeful absurdity abounds. Several songs substitute formal songwriting for extended word games, but Abaya and Guerin compensate with music that’s twice as articulate. “Spit” is a staggering study in sibilance, the artist intoning half the dictionary entries for the letter “S” over a swarm of buzzing synthesizers. If Sesame Street ever wants an electro-clash trip through the alphabet, Abaya provides an excellent audition tape. The mid-tempo boogie “Normalize” nods at Nigerian pop, while prattling off symptoms and syndromes that run from diphtheria (get well soon!) to homophobia (or maybe don’t!). The slow building euphoria of “Dynamite” is built around the phrase “I’ve been waiting for that” as the duo create a sonic collage of possible things she might be waiting for: canned dialogue, gentle marimba pings, found-audio chaos that sounds like a bear attack.
In the last few years, silliness has been both a boon and a crutch for pop musicians of all stripes, who carefully cultivate camp or use inside jokes to batter listeners’ brains. So it feels increasingly urgent to suss out who is flaunting their quirks for viral attention and who is striving to carve out a distinct lane for themselves and a new set of possibilities for their listeners. Even if you initially assumed Abaya came by her weirdness in a contrived way, listening to Gelli Haha dispels any doubt about where she lands on the freak spectrum. Her eccentricities bear themselves beautifully out in her music, and in her fine attention to detail, Angel Abaya shows you just how human that strangeness can be.
