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Kim Gordon, like everybody, is hooked on her telephone. Her vicious and good second solo album, The Collective, shares its identify with a portray she exhibited at New York’s 303 Gallery final 12 months; 27 iPhone-sized holes had been punched out the canvas, every hole a cute little reminder of each synapse you’ve fried watching parkour clips or chasing the infinite scroll. The album itself is even much less refined: Powered by ear-splitting lure beats and churning industrial guitar, anchored by lyrics by which Gordon recites packing lists or mutters about driving in Los Angeles, The Collective is a maelstrom of mundane ideas and humorous asides and flashes of pure rage whipped right into a heavy, unnerving fog. It sounds how TikTok mind feels.
It’s a provocative however becoming new mode for Gordon, who, for over 40 years, has intermingled caustic experimental artwork with a mordant curiosity about mainstream tradition. For each obtusely confrontational facet mission like Free Kitten, there’s a Ciccone Youth, the Sonic Youth alter-ego devoted to reinterpreting radio confections like “Into the Groove” and “Hooked on Love.” She holds down Physique/Head, an elliptical guitar drone mission with Invoice Nace, but additionally serenaded Rufus Humphrey and Lily van der Woodsen at their wedding ceremony on Gossip Woman. On The Collective, she lays her trademark breathy sprechgesang over what can solely be described as Ken Carson-type beats, diving absolutely into the lure experiments she first tried on 2019’s No Dwelling Report; typically, as on opening monitor “BYE BYE,” she genuinely seems like a SoundCloud rapper, nonchalantly distending the names of luxurious clothes manufacturers: “Bella Freud, Y-S-L, Eck-haus-Lat-ta.”
No Dwelling Report, Gordon’s first solo album after making music in bands for 38 years, was thematically indirect, however on songs like “Earthquake” and “Murdered Out,” her stoic visage slipped, revealing lyrics that seemed like stinging, unapologetic rebukes to a persona non grata in Gordon’s life. The Collective, made as soon as once more with alt-pop producer Justin Raisen (Sky Ferreira, Charli XCX), places apart the score-settling in favor of fractured, stream-of-consciousness lyrics that largely eschew poetry or diarism. The unrelentingly noisy vibe is appealingly impulsive and lizard-brained, such as you’re listening to somebody remind themself to type ideas: She mumbles about shopping for overpriced potatoes and leaving out cash for the cleaner, stretches the phrase “bowling trophies” into the album’s closest approximation of a melody, and wails one thing that seems like a spiritual prophecy on “The Believers.” Whereas recording, Raisen inspired Gordon to convey her “summary poetry shit,” and the ensuing album feels concurrently dense and invigorating; on “I Don’t Miss My Thoughts,” asides about house furnishings brush up towards a goblin-voiced name to “suck it up/fuck it up” and a hazy reminiscence of “crying within the subway.” There’s no lyric sheet, and lots of songs really feel like Rorschach checks asking whether or not you hear resilience or brokenness, intercourse or violence, mundanity or surrealism. Typically, it’s exhausting to inform the distinction.
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