Well, nobody will be calling Fear of Men twee anymore. On the Brighton band’s debut album Loom, Jessica Weiss voiced some seriously dark, at times even-morbid sentiments, but they were undercut by disarming jangle-pop guitars and sprightly rhythms that made it difficult to take her at her word. Thirty years of conditioning have taught us to associate these sounds with levity—after all, if Morrissey was mostly just being dramatic, surely Weiss was, too? On their follow-up Fall Forever, though, the band eliminates the disconnect between Weiss’ bleak prose and their delivery system. Any element with even the slightest whiff of Camera Obscura has been replaced by extraterrestrial synths, ominously bowed bass, and guitars distorted beyond recognition. It’s fitting the trio recorded it in a repurposed slaughterhouse, because Fall Forever is the work of a band gutting its sound and watching it bleed out.
“Vesta” introduces the album with a jolt of warped, digitally manipulated noise, a throat clearing of sorts meant to announce the new direction. Like many of the album’s highlights, it’s thrillingly modern. Fear of Men could have easily pulled a lateral when making the shift from guitars to synthesizers, modeling the record after ’80s synth-pop roughly contemporaneous to the indie-pop of their debut, but instead they set their sights forward. In spirit, “Erase (Aubade)” has the clear, glassy directness of the best Sundays or Cranberries singles, but the song’s arrangement is glitchy, austere, and modern. The track runs just two minutes, leaving the sense that something crucial has been cropped; it denies the closure of a traditional pop song. The seemingly sweet “Until You” is thrown off course midway through its run by an outbreak of retching electronics, a detour from which it never returns.
Even the album’s most straightforward dream-pop tunes are battered by sharp, militaristic snares. They create a sense of flagellation that’s driven home by Weiss’ relentless lyrical focus on how much pain and punishment she can withstand, and her repeated assertions that she doesn’t need the intimacy that’s withheld from her. “I’m like an island,” she sings, “I don’t need to feel your arms around me.” Nonetheless, she internalizes the rejection. It manifests itself in a resentment of her own “vile body,” which she describes variously as made of wax and stone, or feeble bones and useless flesh. “I burn my body on the fire/...Breathing deeper now I am free from the crowd/I’m as clean as the shame will allow,” she sings on “Trauma.” Perversely, it’s the album’s poppiest number.
Weiss fills Fall Forever with lyrics like that, fantasies about shedding her skin, becoming one with the elements, leaving the physical world behind and transcending morality. That tight thematic focus means that the songs sometimes bleed together—many feel like minor rewrites of the one that came directly before it—yet the repetition feels deliberate, like part of a calculated do-over. “Without a body, I am free to dissolve,” she sang on Loom. She wasn’t heard the first time around, so it’s as if she’s vowed to repeat herself until the words sink in. This time they do.
