- Using almost solely piano and a single drum beat, Tirzah comes up with enchanting love songs that feel both monumental and intimate.
- Tirzah Maston knows how to have a little fun. Since the 2018 release of her cult-classic album Devotion, the English singer and songwriter has been known for hushed, imperfect experimental pop, brought into the world with the help of her childhood best friend and creative partner Mica Levi. Her second album, Colourgrade, added a layer of tenderness to her understated formula. Written after the birth of her first child (and while she was still carrying her second), her cosy love songs began to take new shapes. Delicate vocal runs were swapped for uneven spoken word, while songs about infidelity and distrust became odes to relaxed domesticity. On the production end, Levi's work developed into wildly intricate and unpredictable puzzles. On Mastin's latest album, trip9love...???, Levi gives the sparsity of previous albums a new heartbeat: stuttering snares, gritty 808s and warbling keys.
In a single-centric music economy, trip9love...??? stands out as an album's album. It was released all at once with no advance singles, so that listeners could experience it as the cohesive project it is. The production method was simple: the duo found one beat, added various piano loops and distorted the tracks. The record finds Mastin and Levi working with an unlikely blend of influences. The upbeat trap of Pi'erre Bourne meshes with the sneaky, untidy melodies of New York School experimentalist Morton Feldman. Across the album, drums lowride with a trap bounce, but maintaining the homely aesthetic of the classic Tirzah record, Levi churns out crunchy and compressed beats, while Mastin dreams out loud about love. trip9love...??? is easily one of the greatest accomplishments in the small but impressive Tirzah catalogue.
The most fascinating aspect of the album is that, track after track, listeners hear the same trap beat, punctuated with delightful claps that play double dutch with powerful kicks. But like a painter adding bolder strokes to a canvas, each song is mixed uniquely, sometimes made new with the subtlest of changes. It never feels redundant or overdone. On "Today," the 808s are merely a spectre in the background, until Mastin transitions out of her moaning chorus and bass drops like a room lined with blown-out speakers. Then there's the occasional moment the percussion cuts out, like on "Promises," where Mastin catches her breath after spitting out her children's chant of a chorus like nyah-nyah-nyah. The record's drums are the most seductive and ubiquitous hook, making the album something akin to a half-hour of endless lotus-eating.
The piano loops add to the tension between trip9love...???'s deeply intimate and faraway club atmosphere. Notes can resound, like a pianist with a foot steadily pressing the damper pedal in a high-ceilinged concert hall, or feel tight and tactile. On "Their Love," simple piano melodies call to mind a beginner piano student's fingers moseying around an untuned keyboard. The original soundscape is disturbed when foreign clusters of erratic and muddled notes bang against it. Mastin asks with empathy, "Some bridges burn, didn't you know?," elongating each third word into rich melisma. On "U all the time," Mastin points a metaphorical finger as she breathlessly sings a list of grievances: "Telling me lies / Taking up space / Leaving me cold / Without a trace." The song also provides the best section of the entire album, when the key suddenly changes and a once mildly overcast scene turns trippy and foreboding.
The frigid edge in these love songs comes from how Tirzah's lyrics are repeated, reverbed and delayed with little regard for traditional song structure. Across "No Limit," which is entirely pieced together from gliding, antagonising hooks, Mastin hurls out an urgent refrain: "What's your limit?" A breakdown introduces a chintzy melody to break the track's delicate aggression, and the percussion chokes, before backsliding and disappearing all together. "We've no place to regret," Mastin wails, delay making the last word land like a new drum pattern. "He made" is probably the most mesmerising of the album's loosely constructed songs, her two-word lines ascending and descending like stacked haikus, as the piano rumbles in the lower register and a three-note melody prances on the opposite end. On "6 Phrazes," the album's steady dance floor pulse is discarded, letting her Devotion-era vocal sketches rise to the surface. There's enough space in the arrangement to hear her lips part.
The effect of a wrong note pressed, a one-take vocal run or a perfectly misplaced guitar screech might seem inconsequential because, at this point, it's so indisputably Tirzah. But real care goes into her rule-breaking, which is what makes it sound so immaculate. When most artists are racing to make the most pristine product, it's an admirable skill to carve brilliance from a place of disarming simplicity, or at least seemingly so. In Tirzah's world, the rawness of the dress rehearsal always proves to be more moving than the show.
Tracklist01. F22
02. Promises
03. u all the time
04. their Love
05. No Limit
06. today
07. Stars
08. he made
09. 2 D I C U V
10. 6 Phrazes
11. nightmare