Hear Kelly Lee Owens’ Atmospheric Club Track “CBM”

In the handful of songs that she has released thus far, the Welsh singer and producer Kelly Lee Owens has proved herself a remarkably versatile musician. With “Lucid” and “Uncertain,” she presented a kind of swirling, stargazing synth-pop—yet on a rework of the former, she performed what amounted to a near-total teardown, leaving only scraps of whispered vocals and swapping out all that luxe, velvety instrumentation for 808 and nothing more. She brought the same intensity to Jenny Hval’s “Kingsize,” flipping the quixotic spoken-word meditation on “soft dick rock” (“using the elements of dick to create a softer, turned-down sound”) into a stern, storming club track. And on “Arthur,” she paid tribute to Arthur Russell by zeroing in on his oceanic echo and letting recordings of rainfall and birdsong do the rest.

“CBM,” the lead song on her forthcoming EP for Smalltown Supersound, finds her fusing the two extremes of her music. On the one hand, it’s tough and insistent, with a full-bore bass throb that you can practically feel clamping down on your chest; a coiled hint of acid pushes its way coolly, relentlessly forward. At the same time, though, even without the strings of “Lucid” and “Uncertain,” the song’s as atmospheric as her lushest, most sumptuously textured work. The fullness of it all is paradoxical, given that it’s mostly made of empty space. At the center, she repeats one phrase like a mantra, as though conjuring the elements out of nothingness: “The colors, the beauty, and the motion.”

Comments are closed.