Making her debut, after a few loose tracks and EPs left on her Bandcamp, with an album on AD 93, this incarnation of Theodora Laird finds in the London label a very suitable emotional positioning for us to situate her music in some current context and pulsating with life. Without implying that feeo’s music sounds particularly like the recent efforts of Joanne Robertson, Olan Monk, or James K, names that have little or nothing to do with each other, her songs retain the same elliptical aura in their construction, as if finding their essence from abstract but fully felt and expressive forms. In a nebulous lineage that traces itself without much linearity from the low-key narcosis of Tricky’s ‘Nearly God’ through the more vaporous moments of Kate Bush in ‘Aerial’ to the sphere of Mica Levi or the stark soul of Niecy Blues, the songs on ‘Goodness’ start from an instrumental minimalism made up of small melodic and textural nuances, gently lifted by ambient synthesizers, mournful guitar or piano chords, and subliminal percussion, to support a voice that is soft in delivery but touching in expression. There is no need to affirm its lyrics, evocative of that potentially nocturnal urban experience between comfort and paranoia, loneliness and an intangible feeling of belonging. Living on suggestion. On the fog and speculation that descends on apathetic returns and the imagery of seclusion. In tune with many of today’s lives.
BS