Cassandra Blackhurst: Watch As My Lungs Fill With Water

 Cassandra Blackhurst returns with her sophomore effort continuing on where she left off with 2008’s debut Autumn, Come Unto Thee. The Tokyo-spawned, Ohio-raised, Columbia and Harvard-educated, and London-poisoned singer/multi-instrumentalist still trades in the same woozy, leprechaun in a box, broken synth‘n’plinth structures that marked out her first album, but this time strips away much of the urgency in the ‘found’ percussion, leaving the bombastic hits and squeals largely as something ‘not quite there’. They echo and they moan as before, but this time wander uneasily over the deeply textured surface of her voice, occasionally ricocheting with such force as to leave the listener bewildered, angry, or in the case of this reviewer, with an accidental glob of sick in the back of his/her throat.

On first listen, Blackhurst’s music reads like an equation. Parentheses, multiplications, addition and subtraction. These jostle up alongside each other like a 5am comedown where once mutual euphoria is tinged with shyness and embarrassment. At times it is as if Blackhurst herself is not even sure where to place these functions, and is comfortable to let them find their own positions. This is where the careful listener is rewarded, the songs unfolding in his/her/its ears like an origami swan picked apart by elves.

If the functions are variable, the variables, whether functioning or defunct, are not. Blackhurst connects the dots, draws the arrows, and circles the O’s and Q’s between proto-Italo-funk, acid-tingled rave-athon post-cock, sub-Sakamoto twinkling and hyphenated posture-jizz. And although these genres are all recognisably present in ooh, roughly 94% of Blackhurst’s songs, it’s as if she has raised an arched eyebrow to them before smashing them into the pigswill with her pale, and frankly stinking fist. Bobbing around in the trough, we (the listener/reviewer/pretender/proclaimer) are liable to pick through these remains like an elderly relative at the buffet of a wake where all the food has been replaced by wool. One may worry that Blackhurst would sneer at the very behaviour required to untangle the threads of the now sodden knitted cake that represents her music in this tortured and ill thought through metaphor, but she would do well to know that a sneer is one half of a smile and wink.

As with a clutch of other albums released in the last six months (Julio Stetson’s Namesake for Cherry and Tears/Tears’s Nothing But Whatever You Said It Was Or Would Be, to name but three) Blackhurst’s comes with a ‘story’. This is a clever move from the multi-singer/instrumentalist/future-banger as it serves as something to pad out reviews. Following the death (and subsequent re-birth) of her father, this former ‘lazybones’ has been holed up in a hermits' retreat in the mountains, recording the farting forest and wringing it dry for sound textures. The squawks, cries, and quacks of the wood-dwelling shitbrains provide the vertebrae of the album, and can be heard underpinning everything from the warbling drum blasts of Again, My Love to the wang-out guitar cockstorm of Only Under Stars.

Watch As My Lungs Fill With Water is an album. Is it? At around 43 minutes and 14 songs it certainly feels like one.