Soft Plastics — DISEMBODY

Madonna’s Ray of Light is the album that made her a voice- less the idiosyncratic character she’d been known as for decades, instead recognised as a proper, skilled vocalist. Her voice is clear and right up front on that album- her run in the musical Evita trained her not just to perform, but to really, properly sing. I say this because Disembody from Soft Plastics is the best recording I’ve heard from them yet- just how deft those vocals have become from all their training together over only a few years. 

Disembody begins with these vocals up against a background of bass and a casiotone-ish percussion, brought together at just the right moment with a languid swoosh of guitar and sun-warped synth like an out of tune church organ; then a moment of tension that hinges a descent into a driving fury of noise toward the end. There’s something like Julia Deans in Fur Patrol doing Lydia about this song, the voice so skilfully oscillating between melancholy and heartache, boredom and simmering rage, that it makes you forget they’d ever rehearsed it. And there’s something timelessly impressive about singers like these who are unafraid to be, and sound, so clear.

Soft Plastics new album ‘Saturn Return’ is available for pre-order from Flying Out, or their Bandcamp page.

Review by C. Billing.