Review Summary: 20,000 gecs
My music isn’t for everyone and that’s on purpose.
Lauren Bousfield does not cater to an audience comfortable in their own skin, and has no respect for fixed delineations. Her target is-that-a-demographic? can knock themselves out with the world's most violent cocktail of rampaging breakcore, pounding electro-industrial, hyperpop-adjacent modulated vocals, snippets of harsh noise, and classically-informed supporting instrumentals. The breadth of that list is neither a gimmick nor an innocuous juggling act: the constituent elements maintain an extremely abrasive dialogue with one another, and their chaotic fission and fusion belie a deceptively consistent central appeal. Bousfield's knack for supporting stylistic pyrotechnics with gratification-oriented songwriting chops sits shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes Drumcorps, Dai Dai Dai, and Machine Girl c.
RePorpoised Phantasies, yet even in such company her approach stands out as idiosyncratic. New listeners can expect a live boombox blasting the Carmina Burana cantata, kersplashing into a bathtub full of cat piss and providing an impromptu battery for a janky washing machine's worth of oversize hoodies soiled with umpteen years of dissociative secretions and illegally obtained samples of Dylan Brady's blood. It
is chaos - but those stains ain't coming out any other way, and Bousfield's methodology wears its points of distinction well as such.
It’s intended to feel huge and to make the listener feel small, to kind of replicate how panic attacks feel…
Well, uh, actually, yes, exactly, that: 'panic attack' is about the only shape for it it. No other polygon could hold that level of jagged contour: background vocals hyperventilating, beats racketing into meltdown, ominous flurries of melodies-in-reverse swooping up your chest and somehow stalling exactly a hair's breadth behind the open
oh fuck of your mouth. Bousfield LP #3
Salesforce wastes absolutely no time in laying it on - similarly to its tearaway predecessor
Palimpsest (2020), this record comes straight out of the gates with a surefire hellraiser: "Mansions No One Wants To Buy For Any Price" epitomises every one of Bousfield's apparent tropes in its stampeding breaks,
Mission Impossible piano hooks, and radioactive carnival of a finale. Its familiar set of thrills belies a new sense of heft in its production - in contrast to
Palimpsest's hurricane of treble, Bousfield has fleshed the low end of her arsenal out with considerable depth, such that the inevitable (please, for the love of God) headphone experience is more a punishing marathon of the senses than, well, a punishing punishment. Where once her beats [click]ed, here they [thwack]; where once lead instruments stabbed and vanished, here their resonance demands Richter data.
Very good - you'll be grateful for this throughout the record, but nowhere more than on the following "Hazer", potentially the most violent track Bousfield has ever put her name to. This comes courtesy of a practically destined feature from scream queen Ada Rook (of solo and Black Dresses fame). Bousfield plays a rather smart bait-and-switch here, confining Rook's trademark harshes to one blistering opening minute, and setting this against one of the album's most robust pop choruses (to which Rook lends her cleans). Both sides feed on each other's instability. Their scope is nuclear, their panic non-negotiable. One does feel rather small.
…but usually somewhere throughout it there’s this sense of resistance to that in the form of hope, empathy and just a sense of being heard.
This realisation may come too little, too late for some, but yes indeed -
Salesforce is neither purely nor indulgently chaotic. Bousfield's devotion to full-spectrum clarity goes beyond her production glow up: the individual elements of her palette now enjoy song-sized trajectories, be they hyperpop mania ("Permanently Closed", "Headstone Prices On Credit"), classical flourish ("Hail Sound", "Halt Draft") or flashcore-adjacent percussive rampages ("Narrow Down Concepts Force Meaning", "Debtors Prison Click Here Disney Needs To See This"). This is a subtle, far-reaching departure from
Palimpsest's umpteen self-cancelling possibilities, suggesting a life-instinct and self-confidence previously all but camouflaged in her work. There's a palpable labour-of-love factor to this record that compensates for what could never otherwise be outright uplifting; her wholehearted commitment to her sound is empowering in itself. The way in which "Permanently Closed" balances its cascading anxiety with a four-to-the-floor earworm is perhaps the biggest revelation here, but the greater focus on individual styles also enables Bousfield to draw on smart sequencing and alternate her strengths across the album. The interplay here too is pleasing.
However, her new approach does carry one unfortunate side-effect: Bousfield places one slight yet decisive increment of faith too many in the strength of her own voice. Her approach to vocals - highly reverberated, breath-heavy, akin hearing the most urgent of melodies through a thunderstorm - worked a treat on
Palimpsest's interminable convection of foreground and background layers, but on
Salesforce's comparatively robust arrangements, she finds herself carrying entire songs. While Bousfield's vocal contributions add a crucial element of trepidation to many of these tracks, they lack the force to tie erratic ("Deserted Olympic Villages") or mic-centric ("Organizational Rot") numbers together when afforded a full spotlight.
On the whole, however,
Salesforce does an admirable job of streamlining Bousfield's sound without foregoing too much of its frenetic bombast. It makes for a worthy follow-up to
Palimpsest, though I would hazard that none of the refinements it makes on that album's brief are quite enough to transcend the sheer extremes of disorienting fluster it reached at the most unexpected junctures. The hysteria on offer here is a little less relentless, but many may find it more approachable as such.
