Too often, a pop singer’s maturity comes at the expense of her whimsy. Take Remi Wolf, who, on her debut album Juno, was a captivating enfant terrible, her attitude so irreproachable and her staccato so daggerlike it seemed Rihanna birthed her at the height of the Talk That Talk era. Her second release, Big Ideas, was more polite than its predecessor but no less fun—see “Toro,” a horny disco-funk confection about hotel room sex with an enormous man. But nothing as mischievous exists on her third record, a somber portrait of semi-reformed adulthood. It’s called Mud, but contains very little filth. Instead, we find Wolf mucking her way through the trials of her Saturn return, prone to self-sabotage, searing bouts of clarity, and the charms of men with mommy issues.
Mud is a dynamic if uneven vehicle for Wolf, a vocalist with a showman’s need for climax. Perched atop the harmonies that her producer Solomonophonic stacks like Jenga blocks, she wails and patters and scratches the pan, a tactic she deploys most lavishly on “Jamie,” her amber-lit memorial to a lost love. She allows her emotional wounds to fester for art’s sake: “Twiggy,” a middle finger to a scrawny ex, crescendoes to a stream of barbed rebukes, like she’s been perfecting them in a diary for this exact moment. As for the hooks, they’re nearly always sticky, as indebted to plaintive and petulant ’00s emo pop as they are to Max Martin’s colossal anthems.
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The drama that animates Mud is a Sisyphean one, and Wolf casts herself as agent of her own embarrassment and woe. On “Bottle,” a windows-down highway sprinter among the best songs she’s ever written, she reproduces the inner monologue of an addict bargaining with herself for recovery: “Can’t get the bottle if I don’t get up/I can’t get drunk if I don’t got drugs.” As a storyteller, her best medium is the vignette. On the record’s conceptual and emotional center, “Covered in Mud,” she sings about rejecting a cute girl at the bar: “You are my type/But I got a date with TV and cheap red wine.” Haloed in distorted guitar and jagged synths, Wolf comes off as a champion of her own avoidance, her heroism charmingly pathetic.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
