Azalia Snail - Petal
Metal
Azalia Snail is a one-woman aesthetic:
there is nobody else who sounds anything like her, and nobody else she
sounds much like. Listen to these two decades' worth of highlights from
her immense discography, and you might imagine that she came up with
her entire repertoire in a vacuum, writing from nothing but the memory
of a dream of a slightly-off-channel radio, recording tapes with a quality
of Eternity, that no one else would ever hear unless they were very
lucky. In fact, shes been fervently engaged with the musical communities
around her for basically her entire life - few people I've met know
more about the history of rock or have more finely honed tastes other
than she does,and she's made records of her collaborations with Sportsguitar,
Truman's Water, Susanne Lewis, Fly Ashtray, Jenny Mae, and others,
(King Missile's John S. Hall turns up here on "Baby
Brother," which first appeared on her debut single, the head-spinning
, Henry Miller-quoting anti-9-to-5ers' anthem "Another
Slave Labour Day.")
If there's one idea that keeps turning up in her work, though, it's
glamour, in it's multiple senses. As a spell of mystery and desirability,
it makes glorious and radiant nthe physical and metaphysical experiences
that are encoded into a lot of these songs. (One of the deepest joys
of listening to her music as long as I have is hearing her lyrics' progression
from confusion to fulfillment, from East Coast to West, from black light
to daylight.) As the alchemical transformation of identity into pop
that sparkled in the velvet diamond mine of the early '70s, it turns
up in the dirt sweet rhythms of her heaviest music. As the shimmering
wall of the unreal. It's everywhere in her palettes of sound: the reverbation
she always returns to sounds like the dissolving of the barriers between
Self and Other. And as the most stylized form of beauty-well, it's everywhere.
Give Azalia's music time and devotional readiness, surrender to her,
and she will open you up. (Here's a hint: think about places, and the
highway devices that connect them, as much as she does.) She can move
as slowly as a snail, but be present for every sound, and you'll feel
the soft bloomalong her path. Sometimes it happens spectacularly -the
trumpet's call in "I Praise You" flies straight to the invisible
crown every time. Sometimes it's more subtle. But it's always there:
a formal consiousness of herself and the people or places she's singing
to, a constant awakening, a whorl and a flowering, an escape into and
from a world of sweetness and noise that she's created.
-D. Totale, Anywhere, 2008.
