Nadine Shah - Filthy Underneath (2024) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

Nadine Shah's style is deliciously difficult to pin down: Like her late pal Amy Winehouse, she started out leaning more toward jazz. There are still traces of that history in her music (see this album's final track "Hyperrealism"), as well as world beat, indie rock, dance music, goth, Northern African folk and Europop. It's also music that demands your attention. You will get nothing else done when listening to all-consuming songs like "Topless Mother," a wild and wildly captivating track with a snaking, PJ Harvey-esque twang. The awesome chorus sounds like a battle cry as Shah bends familiar words into her own language: "Sinatra, Viagra, iguana/ Sharia, Diana, samosa/ Veruca, Tequila, banana/ Alaska, Medusa, gorilla." Shah has said the song is about a counselor she didn't get along with while in treatment for substance abuse. Indeed, the whole album is a travelogue of her way to rock bottom after her mother's death, the loss of socialization and employment during the pandemic, and a failed marriage. Shah has said she stopped leaving the house and began losing her mind to the point of hallucinating and even making plans to take her own life. The heavy "Sad Lads Anonymous" is shocking and beautiful, as she sing-speaks of telling her darkest secrets to a stranger in an awards-show restroom. Shah comes across like a cult of personality—seductive and naughty, like rough velvet; you're drawn in even as the hairs on your neck rise at the potential danger. She sounds almost dreamy on "Greatest Dancer," which is pulled by a gothic undertow, marching band drums and haunted-house synth. Shah has said the song was inspired by using her mother's prescription medications while watching the British dance contest show "Strictly Come Dancing," and it effectively melds baroque small-screen glamour with the grotesque horror of reality ("Terrifying—she is shimmying over/ I'm scared to look"). There is a Siouxsie Sioux feel to "Keeping Score," a dystopian synth noir about "male violence against women." The sober Shah sounds better than ever after discovering a new aspect: "I've always underplayed my singing … not doing too many acrobatics in order to be taken more seriously," she recently said. "Whereas actually, I've got a big voice." Uh, big is an understatement. Powerful is an understatement. Shah seems to channel Alison Moyet on "Even Light"—a song so busy and groovy it's like an interstellar traffic jam—and Medusa on "Food for Fuel." On the latter, she employs a trill used in qawwali, the Arabic devotional music native to South Asia. Producer and multi-instrumentalist Ben Hillier, who also worked with the singer on 2020's excellent Kitchen Sink, understands how to match her with fearless—blaring, keening, peacocking—sonics; rather than shrinking against them, Shah rises. And she's still working hard at fighting her own demons. Set to trip-hop drums, "Twenty Things" is, the singer has said, a "love letter" to people met in recovery—but an open-eyed one that knows relapse is always a possibility . "Now we have removed the bottle/ I'm teething and I'm tired/ Everything is just as it was, the same."

TRACKLIST

1 Even Light
2 Topless Mother
3 Food For Fuel
4 You Drive, I Shoot
5 Keeping Score
6 Sad Lads Anonymous
7 Greatest Dancer
8 See My Girl
9 Twenty Things
10 Hyperrealism
11 French Exit



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