Allie X - Girl With No Face

Like a thespian Transylvanian vampire in leathery gay bars, on third album ‘Girl With No Face’, Allie X careens through ghoulish ‘80s glam rock, weaving together sounds of the analogue, the synthetic and the theatrical: an energetic retrospection to digest all the mundane, vulgar, maddening and unsettling future contemporaneity she faces. At times she muses on the irony of the modern dystopia (“Big Brother’s always out of office”, she sings on opener ‘Weird World’) while at others she unravels her strengths and limitations as a woman. Nevertheless, the cacophony is always well paced, and across this no-skip tracklist of experimental pantomime pop, it’s impossible to pinpoint its best, but the campy strangeness of ‘Hardware Software’ and dentist drill screams of its glam rock title track come close. Then, there’s feudal intensity across ‘Off With Her Tits’, frenetic aggression in ‘You Slept On Me’, underbelly balladry on ‘Saddest Smile’, a leathery, Germanic outro on ‘Staying Power’ and twinkling disco throughout ‘Truly Dreams’. This solitary endeavour - which she describes as sitting in front of a mirror and staring at herself - results in near-complete reinvention, all while retaining melodic guts and expanding the malleability of her misfit artistry.