Perry Blake
Death Of A Society Girl

Release Date: 06/21/2024 | Tracklist

You usually get a feeling that you’re playing a particular album to death but now with online streaming it’s always interesting to actually find out just how much you’ve been revisiting your favourites. So I knew Perry Blake’s ‘sort of’ concept album ‘California’ would rank as one of my most played new discoveries of the last decade or so, but I was surprised when looking at the cold hard numbers that it actually ranked as high as fourth! One of the most evocative and agreeable albums I’ve yet encountered, ‘California’ was that rare work that covered multiple niches; it was an ideal late night listen, it also worked as a summer album, and more specifically it was a perfect holiday companion. It was also somewhat of an outlier in Blake’s oeuvre with it’s thematic focus and more bold, pop based presentation. Yes, the follow up ‘Songs of Innocence’ traded in a similar style a lot of the time but it abandoned the consistency of vision that ‘California’ ran with.

It’s safe to say then that I’d always been hoping for a true follow up to that gem but had started giving up waiting, expecting Blake to continue in a similar vein to previous release ‘Songs of Praise’, a quirky affair filled with all manner of strange vocal and production effects, as well as boasting a great deal of variety between individual tracks. It was by no means a bad album, in fact it was deeply enjoyable for the most part, but it’s still a source of great pleasure to announce that ‘Death of a Society Girl’ feels one hundred percent the follow up to ‘California’, boasting a consistent aesthetic and also going as far as seeming to have a loose story flowing through the track list. Once again the surrounds are opulent, at times intoxicating, but at the heart something is amiss - there’s 'something rotten in the state of Denmark'. On ‘California’ there was an air of faded glamour, and of not feeling like you belong in your new home, whereas this time there’s a fragility, a spectre of death lingering in the peripheral, a feeling of being manipulated by fakes and phoneys.

Opener ‘Requiem’ is confusing in a few ways, it starts with an almost hip hop type of intro and it’s only when Blake’s croon comes in you feel grounded, and then also the manipulated backing vocal repeating the song title was bringing back memories of the experimental ‘Songs of Praise’. It’s a dizzying entry point, like the moment you walk through a grand entrance into the loud music and motion of a masked ball. ‘One of These Days’ could have alternatively been named ‘For a Dream’ following the title of the opener, as this one continues on a similar skittering beat but feels all the more dreamlike, a little wistful too. The spirit of mid ‘90s to mid ‘00s David Bowie seems to inhabit this album but never more so than on third track (and early highlight) ‘Nobody’s Child’; the pretty harp music box melody coupled with a mournful violin provide a backdrop that feels angelic, and the overall effect is like standing on the other side of the Pearly Gates eavesdropping on Bowie as he serenades the afterlife. At the 3:44 marker the music falls into a Portishead abyss just momentarily, affording us a peak at that dark heart.

That darkness is confirmed on ‘Song of the Wind’ which tells us a lot more of this story with the lyric ‘he wrapped her in a blanket, threw her in a skip, she was identified by braces and a birthmark on her hip’, all accompanied by James Bond style dramatic strings. ‘Concertina’ has similarities with ‘Nobody’s Child’ but is even more delicate, and once again everything feels precarious; images of ballerinas dancing across a slowly cracking frozen lake, or of a butterfly carefully stepping along a spider’s web, death lurking below beauty. It makes for another exceptional Blake work that must rank among his very best songs. At this stage it's important to mention the two lead singles, ‘Lets Fall in Love’ and ‘Death of a Society Girl’, as they’re also highlights here, both very confident arrangements, the latter incorporating spoken word sections to great effect. So as you can probably deduce, in a similar fashion to ‘California’ there are no weak or jarring moments to report, just a track list made up of songs of standalone brilliance sequenced among a remainder of enveloping mood pieces and deep cuts.

Among Perry Blake fans there will always be those who swear by his more varied and grounded first two chamber pop releases, and they’re excellent enough that I can certainly entertain that line of thinking, but for my money ‘California’ and this are his best work. Hopefully he gives into another grand conceptual ‘flight of fancy’ at least once more, as the results speak for themselves.

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