Natalia Catalan’s songs operate under clown car physics. While their runtimes rarely exceed the two-minute mark, listening to them feels like crawling through an impossibly tiny door to find that the space you’ve entered is vast and multileveled on the inside. Catalan is Alice, her debut album Die Without Makeup is Wonderland, and she’s always a note away from dousing the “eat me” cake in the “drink me” potion—sounds shrink and stretch, distinctions between digital and analog become wholly irrelevant, recognizable melodies stutter or fizzle out or get replaced as soon as they’re on the precipice of legibility. The space between songs is abrupt or nonexistent, packing the record’s seventeen minutes with whiplash.
“I like to have [the transitions] be as different as possible dynamically or speed-wise,” Catalan told Lyndsey Knecht for Red Hot Org’s newsletter. The individual songs themselves feel cut-and-pasted together; the juxtaposition between each of them only heightens Die Without Makeup’s fragmented, defamiliarizing feel. The songs are often based around the looped repetition of simple but loaded phrases—often titular phrases, as is the case with album centerpiece “I Want Him To Love Me.” A drum machine races like a heart in the throes of a crush or an anxiety attack (or both), until the voice of featured artist Almost Now stretches itself around zippy synths like a wad of well-chewed bubblegum, singing, “I want his love, I want his kisses / I want him with me in the kitchen doing dishes” with a palpable desperation. “21 Times” captures a rinse-and-repeat cycle of going back to the same unreliable lover through the ebb-and-flow of its mellow glitch and muffled, spiraling guitar licks. The soft rock-R&B of “Ashamed” rides the same melody for two straight minutes, a sampled voice asking “Do you love me?” keeping the time in between shakes.
Die Without Makeup is conceptual but never self-serious. Catalan treats her deconstructed-and-reconstructed jazz-pop like an amusement park—quite literally on “Ride Operator,” the record’s thesis statement. “Ride Operator” was written around the same time Catalan decided to medically transition. Like a rollercoaster on a slow creep up to the big drop, “Ride Operator”’s minimalistic strumming builds anticipation for a colossal shift that never comes; instead, the change is incremental and only seems drastic upon reflection, announcing itself not in 180 degree turns but in nonlinear moments of quiet self-observation. Lyrically, Catalan challenges us to question where artifice ends and sincerity begins—and what gets dismissed as artificial on the surface only to be the pathway to something genuine: “I put on my costume / and I feel like I lost you / but only for a moment / I went to the pool and I put my toes in / I went to the mirror / I saw it clearer.” Sometimes performance is the only way to the truth. Sometimes the only way to put oneself back together is to take oneself apart. [live (without fear)]
Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, Merry-Go-Round Magazine, Post-Trash, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.
