fluc

Connie Constance / GHOST NOTES

Samstag, 27. April

Connie Constance´s music has a neo-soul sheen and a bloody punk heart. Performing live last year, the British artist moved with Ari Up swagger: She wore pink eye makeup smeared like a bandit´s mask, mashed her feet to the floor, and let her colorful box braids fly. Yet her mutable singing voice can take on the measured care of jazz, and, on her debut album English Rose, convincingly pulls off spiky indie-disco anthems and melancholic pop as well. An unruly energy remains throughout, though, and at times Constance´s serrated rasp sounds like it could tear out of her throat.

Constance, 23, grew up in Watford, a green suburb at the tail end of the London tube line, where she´s said she felt like an “anomaly” as a mixed-race kid. English Rose´s title track revisits the gnawing feeling of being an outsider in your home country with a spare, subversive cover of the Jam´s 1978 song, originally a paean to a fair-skinned beauty. Constance´s should-be-definitive version takes the historically white privileging term “English rose” and refigures it as a symbol for the porous, prismatic nature of British identity. Another of the album´s lyrics sums up her inclusive point of view: “Our British blood ain´t all the same.”

Blunted vowels, dropped consonants, and liberal f-bombs lend a devil-may-care chumminess to Constance´s music, whether singing about relationship strife or airing insurgent political views. Her rakish edge fuels the anxiety-ridden “I Want Out,” where staccato speak-singing and two-tone ska synths construct a slam-poetry “Ghost Town” for the Brexit era. The guitar-driven “Bloody British Me” sends up armchair activists with a hot-blooded fury that´s no less vivid for a couple of lyrical clangers. (“Pick up the penny[…]/But I can´t buy a penny sweet,” she sings. Yes, we know: Everywhere is contactless now.) A nonchalantly lovely chorus is memorable for happier reasons, evoking Lily Allen´s ability to flip from sanguine to sly in the space of a beat. “Stuck in the mud/Can’t move forward,” Constance sings sweetly, before raging, “Forward?/What’s that?/Fuck that!”a chant sure to animate any young, impassioned British crowd. (pitchfork.com)

www.facebook.com/itsconniesworld/
www.instagram.com/itsconniesworld/
www.itsconniesworld.com