Sophie

• Product [Numbers, 2015] A-
• Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides [Transgressive/Future Classic, 2018] A-

Consumer Guide Reviews:

Product [Numbers, 2015]
It's hard to hear this 26-minute, eight-song, album-shaped deliverable as sex music even though its deluxe edition offers a pricey dildo-plus-buttplug item difficult for guys to share so it must be for ppl with two nearby holes--that is, despite the male auteur's trans gestures, an anatomically conventional woman or two. Not only are the detextured girly voices too cartoony to be sexual, the many clever electronic noises--"Bipp"'s bips, "Lemonade"'s fizz, "Hard"'s panoply, the descending hook of the transitional "Just Like We Never Said Goodbye"--just aren't tactile enough. Except on the merely electronic "MSMSMSM," however, they are funny, beaty, imaginative, and so consumer-friendly they could pass for kind. This is not the future of music. But as a diversionary substitute, it's aces. A-

Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides [Transgressive/Future Classic, 2018]
The riskiest tracks here are the two where the London-to-L.A. producer-vocalist suppresses one half or the other of her disorienting stealth-comic synthesis: the opening "It's Okay to Cry," which leans hard on the soprano whose dulcet artifice is believed by some metaphysicians to represent her TRUE SELF, and the six-minute "Pretending," all strident squalls and swells that roll slowly to a stop like hardening lava or a Harley slurping its last ounce of fuel. Often I tune out the first and get annoyed with the second. But the rest of the album is all laughs and thrills in which sweet clarity defies a panoply of beaty techno sound effects at different junctures every time you listen. For me the most reliable comes as a reward right after "Pretending": "Immaterial," where she has the generosity to grant one of technodancepop's most generic and cheerful riffs the Sophie version of eternal life. A-