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Self Esteem: A Complicated Woman review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week
After her big breakthrough album and West End fame, Rebecca Lucy Taylor works through her worries in real time on her new LP – to fascinating and confusing effect
There are moments where the lyrics match the sound: 69 combines distorted rave-era-evoking beats and an explicit checklist of what Taylor does and doesn’t enjoy in bed (winningly, given that it variously mentions pegging, scissoring and the reverse cowgirl position, it was released as a single); Mother’s grimy house pulse is topped with a blistering dismissal of a self-absorbed ex that contains the impressively sick burn: “Are you interested in growing? She has mentioned Elbow’s reliably roof-raising One Day Like This as a model for part of the album’s sound and you can hear its influence in the massed vocals and swelling orchestration that liberally pepper A Complicated Woman. There are moments when the choir arrives and you think “them again?” – closer The Deep Blue Okay marries them to a fidgety piano line and ends up sounding like a cross between LCD Soundsystem’s All My Friends and something off The Greatest Showman soundtrack, a deeply peculiar cocktail.
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