Review Summary: Anna Meredith returns with a kaleidoscopic work of mania and heart. Madness has never sounded so good.
Writing about Anna Meredith’s work is a difficult task. Not due to her impressive technical skill, or her genre hopping tendencies, which mesh classical music, electronic music, pop, and the avant garde. Nor is it due to the obtuse quality of her compositions and lyricism. It is due to the fact that, in spite of all that, her music is so plainly emotional and relatable. Like a musical computer programmer, she harnesses her compositions as a secondary language that plugs directly into the emotional centers of the brain.
At its core, FIBS is a record about madness. Muscular paranoia and grandiose mania, lashed around a vulnerable, emotional core that struggles to endure the whiplash and come across as something other than truly mad. The title alludes to this as the album plays out as a series of manic episodes that are structured so meticulously that they are almost passed off as a series of organized eccentricities. "Are these the sounds of madness？" the listener may ask. No, surely the author is just a career eccentric. Surely.
Anna immediately sets the tone for the album with 'Sawbones:' a wall of sound that would sound cacophonous in anyone else's hands. Instead, thundering bass and drums pave a road for tense and buzzing electric strings and synths moving and turning in perfectly chaotic harmony. The album as a whole is primarily constructed of these sweeping, immense walls of sound, carried forward with a confident momentum and breakneck pace that carries you from one audacious idea to the next before you get a chance to question just what it is that you're listening to. It crashes over you swiftly, like a wave of anxiety and wonder.
Not every track is characterized by pounding walls of sound, though. 'Inhale Exhale,' a sweet and shimmering pop song, features light, fluttering, erratic keyboards, set at a brisk pace for the breathy vocals to repeat the titular mantra "inhale/exhale" as the subject attempts to ground themselves amidst building mania. Deep, sticky punches of synth tie the subject to the ground up until the climax, when the punches lose grip and the track soars into the sky. In a flash, its gone.
This is followed by a series of highs and lows. You catch your breath on 'Calion,' a piece of dark, stripped down techno that pulses and slithers like a heartbeat in the dark. Later, 'Bump' is a brassy buzz saw interlude bridging the vulnerable 'Killjoy' with the tranquil 'Moonmons,' another moment of respite from the album's controlled chaos of keyboards, brass bombast, and sweeping, kalidescopic synths.
The album reaches its climax with its penultimate track: 'Paramour.' Frenetic synthesizers and pounding drum beats provide a quaking foundation upon which screeching guitars and bombastic brass bounce off of one another. Back and forth. Building ever higher, harder, faster, akin to a colossal, aural jenga tower. The impressive feat isn’t the height of the tower, but Anna Meredith’s ability to keep the tower steady and stable, whilst giving the impression that it could collapse at any moment.
In fact, the album as a whole functions as a grand balancing act, although it is not without its flaws. Like a day in the life of a madman Anna punctuates the records wildest moments with several periods of respite. These tranquil bridges and moments of rest seem necessary on the surface: a much needed opportunity for the listener to catch their breath. But in practice, they serve to halt the momentum of FIBS and awkwardly break up its pacing. If the album were to keep its breakneck momentum as a constant throughout its run time, or cut down the length of its more muted interludes, it would likely make an even greater impact than it already does.
But at the end of the day, this is grasping at straws. Listening to FIBS, you are in the sure grip of someone who is confident in their own madness. A work as audacious and precise as FIBS doesn't seem to care about trivial criticism or critique. So, leave any conventional notions and preconceptions at the door, plug in, and buckle up. If you're lucky, you might go mad too.
