This week I listened to PRESSURE by Julia Wolf. Now this is very much something I do not typically listen to, which made me very excited when it was recommended to me by a friend of mine. I think the music I like that is closest in sound to this might be Black Dresses but even then they don't sound very much alike. PRESSURE is this odd mix of modern electronic/pop music and chugging metal riffs. Wolf sings in this pretty voice, which is very much in the pop realm, especially on some of the songs where they really turn up the autotune on her vocals. It creates a strong constrast to the pounding drums and heavy riffs that fill most of the record. But then there are these calmer moments with these almost math rock-influenced clean guitars or soft synth backing her vocals. It feels like all these contrasting ideas just should not work but they do! I find it very commendable as I think there are a lot of musicians that try to incorporate strongly contrasting musical ideas but just fail miserably and the record sounds disjointed. This album does NOT sound disjointed at all. It feels so natural to hear these pretty vocals with soft keys and Amen Breaks behind them to transition into heavy riffs. These contrasts keep the album sounding fresh the whole way through, as Wolf decides how far into each lane she wants to fit into throughout a song. This whole concept is aided by the overproduction of the album, which I know is shocking for me to say considering my love of underproduction, but let me explain. Heavy guitars and drums tend to want to be underproduced a little bit, while all the pretty vocals and poppier want to have a cleaner production, though not quite overproduced (at least in my opinion). Now the natural instinct here is to just clean up the heavier stuff to match the level of production of the poppier stuff, but then it feels unbalanced as the heavier stuff sits in an uncomfortable zone of production. So what do you do here? You overproduce all of it so it all feels uncomfortable! That uncomfortableness is the key to how an album like this works, as it unifies the sounds and makes the listener (or at least myself) feel like they are on Julia Wolf's wild rollercoaster that feels like it is going to fly off the rails at any moment but it just hangs on by a thread. That best describes how I experienced this album. This isn't something I see myself coming back to too often, but there are certainly times when I'm in the mood for something like this and when I am, I know exactly where to find it. 8.5/10
