Review Summary: Obscured by the detritus
Shah's latest album sees her return to the starkness of 2017's excellent
Holiday Destination after the uneven but wickedly playful sound of 2020's
Kitchen Sink. It's an understandable fallback - in the sizeable gap between albums, Shah has had to endure providing palliative care to her mother during lockdown, the dissolution of a marriage, and recovery from trauma-induced addiction. It is perhaps a grisly impulse that we expect powerful work to emerge from such a horrific period in an artist's life - I braced myself for bleakness before slipping on the headphones. It is also an unfair expectation - everyone processes grief and recovery differently. For Shah, the method of management appears to be rhythm;
Filthy Underneath's first half is dominated by sticks and polished post-punk primality.
There is a propensity for the almost-chorus in this record. Shah repeats phrases with slight lifts to create hooks with varied success. In the opening salvo of tracks, standout 'Topless Mother' breaks this stricture with a soaring refrain of nonsense word associations. The song deals with a therapy session that is not yielding results, and the chorus evokes an aural Rorschach test. It's the second shortest track in the collection and shines from this brevity - at many points, the songs could benefit from conciseness or one extra element to carry them home. Another victory is 'Keeping Score'; a percussive dark ballad that opens into an expansive synth vista of a chorus. She shifts to a higher register as she sings about a world on fire and finds the scene; an unending vista of coal pulsing with orange cuts.
As the album wears on, we come across the thundering 'Greatest Dancer'. With its front-loaded thumping beat that eschews cymbal for a big synth interlude between verse and bridge, it chronicles an anxious narcotic session of moving alone in front of the TV while watching a dance competition. The song creates tension with no outlet but overstays its welcome. This is a common experience during the album - the listener understands the sensory information being imparted but does not receive an insight into what this means. There's honesty, but there's also a restraint that never crumbles. Perhaps it's a testament to poise even when curtains are curling into flame, but at times the audience wants to know the horror of seeing the beams burst the plasterboard while coming down. Failing that, in an album with so much movement, let us step into the next sensation before we become over-familiar with the angle being explored.
As a confessional,
Filthy Underneath provides plenty of dark truth but tends to blunt the catharsis. Shah is a great talent and this work still could provide plenty of evocation to a listener. The album works less well at creating moments that bookend those experiences, and it's a difficult trick to keep things interesting with no release. Normally I would champion something that does not become so overwrought it chokes on the performative, but here, there's perhaps a chance to let go that never quite arrives.
