REVIEW: FKA TWIGS - "LP1"
If you asked a male music critic to describe LP1—the full-length debut by British musician FKA twigs—they’d probably tell you it’s an album about sex. “FKA twigs’s LP1 Is Not Just Like Sex, It Is Sex,” reads a Gawker headline. “This is an album to have sex to,” says Hayden Manders on Refinery 29. Even the writers of Vice will tell you, “FKA twigs has given us a collection of songs that will keep boners stiff and panties wet for generations to come.”
Let’s get this straight: LP1 is not about sex. It’s an album about a lot of things, things like identity and power dynamics and sexual roles, but to say that it’s “40 minutes of sex and touching” (Eric Henderson, Slant Magazine) is a gross generalization that robs the album of its power. What FKA twigs has done here is reinvent our standards of individuality and femininity and selfhood, while also creating one of the most sonically stirring records of the last four years. It’s a remarkable piece of art on both an auditory and intimate level that captures the emotional experience of Generation Y through an intensely personal lens.
The music of LP1 frequently embraces the surreal and the minimalist. With her previous releases EP1 and EP2, FKA twigs established a sound as imposing as it is unique, and on LP1, she develops that sound into an instrument of her emotions. The emotional range represented here is one no male critic was expecting, or even dared to notice.
We expect female musicians to fit into certain boxes when it comes to sexual expression: dominant or submissive, virginal or promiscuous. But one of LP1’s most striking assets is its dynamic sense of character. Over the course of ten songs, FKA twigs plays a multitude of roles that demonstrate an entire spectrum of emotional and cerebral characteristics. We see her aggressive, outspoken desire on “Two Weeks” as she cries “my legs are apart for when you’re ready to breathe in.” Yet minutes later in “Numbers,” we also witness profound moments of doubt and uneasiness as she whispers, “Why you gotta go and hurt me babe? Why you gotta go and make me cry? I just wanted to see you.” Though we try to define women by black and white ideas of sexuality, FKA twigs never stops to represent any one idea of anything—she is strictly and unabashedly herself.
But just like any young person, FKA twigs isn’t quite sure who she is yet. “I love another and thus I hate myself,” she chants on “Preface,” and in “Lights On” she longs to reveal herself to her partner, singing “When I trust you we can do it with the lights on.” This theme of uncertainty in one’s own image comes to a climax in “Video Girl,” in which she confronts her past as a dancer in other artists’ music videos. Delegated to nothing more than a hollow body directed by others, she sings emptily, “I can’t recognize me.”
The result is a hugely powerful piece of work. All at once, FKA twigs sings of betrayal—betrayal by others and betrayal to herself. By the album’s end, she has become an incredibly strong figure. “Just nod your head and get up / I'm not going let you give up” she demands on “Give Up.” She is fluid throughout the album, both empowered and vulnerable, confident and terrified. She is uncharacteristically a human being—a role we rarely let women fill in modern music.
FKA twigs has also taken on a huge agency in the creation of her own album. Not only is she a writer on every track, but she has also produced a whole mass of the album’s content. She’s taken the initiative in becoming the sole creator of her work, saying in an interview with Pitchfork, “I love my music, so I want to produce, write, and serve my music. I've had to learn about EQ frequencies, and programming, and space, and clutter, and how to be a better piano or bass player, everything.”
Female producers and artists are dramatically underrepresented in the commercial music industry, but not for a lack of talent. Women like M.I.A., Grimes, Wondagurl, and now FKA twigs have made some of this generation’s most important music. M.I.A. has challenged political and social policies across the world, Grimes was awarded “Best Track of the Decade So Far” by Pitchfork, Wondagurl produced a track for Jay-Z before she even graduated high school, and FKA twigs has created an album more emotionally poignant than most anything else in the past year.
We need artists like FKA twigs—female artists fully responsible for their art, their identity, and their culture. With LP1, FKA twigs has created a piece of work all her own, an album that is as bold as it is innovative. Though I don’t always agree with everything Carl Rogers has to say, he was right when he said, “The most personal is the most universal.” And this album is about one woman’s experience. But just how truthful it is to that experience is what makes it so powerful.
LP1 is one of the most groundbreaking, fascinating, and emotional albums of the year; it’s one that warrants a listen just on the foundation that it exists at all. This is the sound of the future, because this is the sound of right now.
Best Tracks: Preface, Two Weeks, Video Girl
If you like FKA twigs, also try: Björk, Gazelle Twin, Banks
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