Depending on the listener, the tone of asdfasdf—the debut EP from Melbourne bedroom-pop artist Katie Dey—could be described as anarchic joy, or blissful insanity, or uncontainable anxiety. Broadly speaking, you could make do with “uncontainable.” While formally indie-pop, asdfasdf loosened the genre with inquisitive psychedelia and fidgety freak-folk. The result was an emotional canvas of unusual breadth. The brushstrokes were Dey’s startling vocal contortions: She sang fast, throttled melodies way up in the nosebleed frequencies, as if to avoid contamination by the music. The record had a complicated beauty—nervy and messy, but intricately so. On “don’t be scared,” the ambient detail was practically molecular, suggesting a desire to craft a perfect microcosm of a faulty universe. In the eyes of Dey’s quiet, enraptured cult, she may have succeeded.
Flood Network, the name of asdfasdf’s follow-up and Dey’s debut album, refers to a formative set of personal crises: “flash floods,” she calls them here, in a tetchy song called “Fleas.” Inverted to “network flood,” the title could also suggest a type of cyberattack, an idea present in the the digital commotion behind songs like “Fleas” and “Only to Trip and Fall Down Again.” What defines Flood Network is the manic energy of both interpretations. Helpfully, the 17-song record includes eight interstitials to ease the intensity, though admittedly they’re more useful in the first half, which is frantic and sparkly, than the sleepier second. Part of the appeal is the voyeuristic thrill of hearing emotionally knotty music made to satisfy nobody but its author, sometimes at the audience’s exclusion.
One quality Dey shares with her comrades at Orchid Tapes, the Toronto/New York label that reissued asdfasdf—as well as at her new home, Joy Void—is a penchant for solipsism. It’s the kind of record that properly justifies the “bedroom-pop” tag, not just in the sense of where it’s made but the conflicted serenity to be found there, where our identities reconfigure in private, away from the distorting outside world. On “Fake Health,” as acoustic guitar stabs leak into stereo, Dey’s production captures the warm embrace of a sudden synaptic overload—the network floods that carry you away—while pouring out her heart: “I hate what I can’t make attainable,” she sings mournfully, not with indie-pop petulance but resignation. “I’ll scrape my wooden rake in the pits of hell,” she sighs later in the song.
The obvious change from asdfasdf is Dey’s voice. On the EP, she sang with sweet grotesquerie, like an asphyxiated mother desperately cooing lullabies, despite having had her mouth filled with glue. Now, on songs like “Fleas,” her deformed, wistful croak creeps into legibility, an alien sound that blends of Montreal’s playful sincerity with Xiu Xiu’s wounded nudity, even a little Karen Dalton. “You have my soul/You gained it when I gave up on me,” Dey sings on “Fear o’ the Light,” to which she adds an epilogue: “So I sit around/Making animal sounds out of cutlery.” A deliciously bizarre image, loaded with inexplicable melancholy, it’s Katie Dey in a nutshell.
