Album review: FKA Twigs – LP1

The debut album by the young singer from the English countryside is a stellar effort.

The English singer FKA Twigs performs at the 2014 Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago. Barry Brecheisen / Invision / AP Photo

LP1

FKA Twigs

Young Turks

Four stars

From David Bowie to Lady Gaga, music is a whole lot more compelling in the hands of artists who look like they’ve landed from another planet.

FKA Twigs is the latest in that lineage and her debut album, LP1, possesses the requisite innovation to back up her striking, future-soul-alien persona.

Ms Twigs, aka Tahliah Barnett, was raised in the countryside of Gloucestershire. The county, in south-west England, is home to many members of Britain’s royal family, but also has its fair share of urban decay and inbred rural eccentricity, with limited cultural pursuits to stimulate the younger generation. Isolation, in this case, seems to have catalysed something special inside Barnett’s head.

It's also worth noting that she grew up less than an hour's drive up the M5 motorway from Bristol, the birthplace of trip-hop – much of LP1's sonic landscape pays lip-service to the genre's languid beats, while her vocal extremities occasionally evoke the glassy siren call of Portishead's Beth Gibbons.

LP1's impact isn't instantaneous. Its opener, Preface, is a stuttering, space-aged, choral workout that never quite builds on its brooding portent. And the sweet, warped-R&B chorus of Lights On resembles a shimmering desert island floating in a sea of arrhythmia.

By the third track, Two Weeks, however, it occurs to you that something remarkable is transpiring.

The subject matter is a touch more Nine and a Half Weeks, mind you: in attempting to tempt the object of her affections away from a less-deserving woman, there are more euphemisms than at a convention of 1970s comedians. But it's all wrapped up in a breathy brand of voracious modern romanticism that makes it feel entirely essential and ever-so-slightly terrifying at the same time.

Despite a whole raft of critical comparisons elsewhere to R&B kittens such as Aaliyah and Ciara, there's nothing here that will be troubling the nation's dance floors. But Barnett's ability to pull an utterly addictive refrain from the imploding experimental stardust of her creations is proved once and for all within the lush five minutes of Pendulum.

LP1 is the album that Lana Del Rey could have made instead of Ultraviolence, if she were truly mangled rather than giving a vapid impression of a troubled soul, or the record that Barnett's high-concept American contemporary, Janelle Monáe, has been trying to force out while all-too-often overcomplicating the sonic pudding.

If there’s any justice in the world, in FKA Twigs, a new star is born.