Carnival style, Bianca Scout welcomes us along for the ride like a ringmaster. Things You Say articulates all that’s deep and creepy in some freakish fun land. Listening, spiderwebs spread across my eyes, suddenly spun, unseeingly. And by what creature? This is music for those figments and ghosts hiding among the cartoonish lights, cracked-paint faces, creaking rides that chatter among tiny struggles, nightmares, mediations, dead reality. Lost moths, trapped in lights. Kind of beauty that makes me sleepy. Scout speaks to all of that, asks, how can anything be of quality if we wash its ghosts away with common sense?
She carousels us into some murky places amidst all the spectacular technicolor. For me, it’s some deeply buried thoughts—this music tripping me into the holes I’ve buried them in. My body begins to feel a bit too heavy, overwhelmed and under a whim, before being snatched back into form by her voice. A thin voice like a thin moon traced into the sky by a spectral hand, and thin cats circle beneath it. Above, a bird carries a small bowl of water on its back. Each small thing, each touch, each hush, stretches itself out wide enough so as to cover the whole of Things, the way one umbrella can protect you from the whole sky.
You could say this is a particularly light-handed form of dark ambient pop but it’s more like a dimly lit antechamber where dragonflies make their dinner on dusty lace. Somehow I’m still awake, thanks to, among other things, some kind of keys that send out hushed secrets in “Mouth Fuck” and “Pallos”, before stretching out to hum with fuller force in “Borderline”. Perhaps she recorded them in an actual fun house? There is a commonality and consistency among these little moments of various weights that weave the whole web, if not symmetrically, then freehandedly and emotively. Some vocals in “You” affected into a similar timbre to Klein’s, whom Scout has collaborated with in the past and continues to today. Hear Scout sing in “Stars”. Fireflies that wink like fallen ones on warm nights.
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