If our weekly music roundup wasn’t enough for you, TV Editor Tim Lowery and Staff Writer Mary Kate Carr have some sonic recommendations of their own, including a Melbourne-based artist and a follow-up album by a former child star.
Recently, I fell into one of those deep-dive reorganizations, the kind where I’m so in-the-zone that hours can go by without me noticing, as I weighed whether I really needed to keep that issue of Mojo magazine or that gig poster my friend tore down back in 2007. That is, the time would have flown without me realizing it if wasn’t for the record I was turning over every 10 minutes or so: The Smackwave EP by Melbourne-based artist Spike Fuck.
This is one of those releases that, for me, is impossible to listen to just once: It’s confessional, woozy, catchy, and beautiful, reminding me of a lot of stuff I like—particularly SF’s punky enunciations and the bedroom-DIY spirit of her synths and guitars—and still feeling like its own thing. The EP also sounds very insular, like you’re tapping into someone’s brain or heart. “When I first wrote the songs for Smackwave, I didn’t imagine anyone would hear them,” Spike Fuck told Vice back in 2016, when the EP dropped. “I didn’t really wanna tell people I had been a junkie. I also didn’t really want anyone and everyone to know I’m trans. I knew I had to be candid though.”
And it is, with many of the songs about her attempting to get clean and living up to both words of the project’s name (“Though I’m addicted to drugs, yeah I can still give good head,” she sings in the phenomenal kickoff track “Junkie Logic”) while straying into dark, yearnful, and romantic territories and delivering some goosebumps-inducing moments. She’s described this sound as “a blend of late-’80s new wave and late-’70s post-punk, with a dash of country music/singer-songwriter sensibilities delivered in a Las-Vegas-ballroom-karaoke vocal style,” and that’s pretty dead on. In the British music magazine Loud And Quiet, while talking about the influence of the late, great Roky Erickson, she noted: “I’ve always been interested in people who have been on the edge of reality and people who grappled with fame or the promise of fame and money and then fucked it up.” And that outsider-artist quality is on full display here too.
Spike Fuck hasn’t released much music or even an album yet. The single “Body By Crystal,” which is very much in the vein of Smackwave, arrived in 2019, and a year later she teamed up with The Slingers for the fantastic “Kind Hearts,” a strung-out, smoking-in-the-rain, Exile On Main Street-esque country song. And then…nothing. But out of the blue on Christmas Eve, she dropped “Other Right Hand Of The Lord” and, just a few weeks ago, “Eternity & Time,” which finds her in more rock-band-leading mode. I really hope there’s a whole lot more to come—and soon.
Mary Kate Carr: Childstar, Grace VanderWaal
I’ve always been interested in the subject of child performers, so I was immediately intrigued when Grace VanderWaal released her album Childstar earlier this month. VanderWaal was a cute and precocious 12-year-old when she won America’s Got Talent as a singer-songwriter in 2016. Last year, the 21-year-old appeared in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis as a purity pop star whose virginity is the obsession of an entire city. The allegory may be a bit too on the nose, but based on Childstar, it doesn’t sound that far off, either. The record reflects VanderWaal’s relationship to the spotlight, and how exhilarating, confusing, painful, addicting, and complicated it can be.
The album opens with the knockout trio of “Proud,” “Brand New,” and “Homesick,” which tell the story of a girl trained from a young age to please adults, who was rewarded with attention and that enviable designation of being “special.” In VanderWaal’s lyrics, the pressure is constricting and impossible: “Humble child, promise I’ll be small / I won’t take up space at all / Remember gratitude, you tell me I’m great / When I don’t cry and I never ask for nothing.” But there is room for nuance, too, as she wrestles with her own complicity in her fame: “What if I wanna perform?” she asks, conceding to “speak the language” of the industry even as it cuts her tongue. “What makes something so complicated is when there’s no one to blame—that would be so easy,” the singer told Billboard. “If you’re getting exposed to millions of people who are saying, “You’re great at this, you’re doing good,” while your brain is literally forming—of course there would be repercussions of that. But no one did anything wrong.” Throughout the album, there’s a longing for safety and peace that isn’t present even in her own memory: “All I ever wanted never did exist at all / I feel like my whole life has been haunted / By a child who never was.”
The songs that have less explicit connections to VanderWaal’s youthful fame are still beguiling, well-produced pop. But packaged within this project even those tracks are impossible to view outside the lens of being young and famous. Playful tracks like “Babydoll” and “Behavioral Problems” bring to mind an early 2000s paparazzi princess. Her romantic songs alternate between the obsessive people-pleasing and the domineering “babydoll” character; in both cases, we can see her grappling with owning her own sexuality after being hyper-observed for much of her life. As she sings on “Brand New,” “I’m the woman, I’m the sin / A blemish burned into your skin / I’m not the mother of your loss / I’m not the sister of your lust.”
Childstar is accompanied by a short film co-directed and co-choreographed by VanderWaal herself. Lots of words have been spilled on child stardom, but where words fail, movement may fill in the gaps—the dance is wrenching and evocative, enhancing the emotion that is present in the music. If you, like me, have any interest in the plight of the child performer, Childstar is an essential document to the canon.
