Heartworms
Glutton for Punishment
SPEEDY WUNDERGROUND
When she’s not playing music, one of the things that Jojo Orme—the brainchild behind the London-based outfit Heartworms—does is volunteer at the Royal Air Force Museum. It’s surely no coincidence, then, that “In the Beginning,” the opening track on her debut album Glutton for Punishment, is the sound of a plane overhead, its flightpath disturbing the frequency of the air as it makes its journey. Save for a brief, echoing cling at the start, it’s essentially 41 seconds of nothingness: no other sounds, no music. And yet, to call it nothing is inexact. It’s the presence of absence—the heavy weight of lacunae—that sets the tone for what’s to follow.
Immediately, that’s “Just to Ask a Dance,” a tumbling song of dark romance that’s as much Siouxsie and the Banshees as it is The Cure, albeit with elements of Portishead thrown in. It sounds like war—dramatic, destructive, unforgiving—and yet within its electronic beats and Orme’s eerie vocals there’s a surprising warmth that envelops you, albeit the warmth of the apocalypse and its flames of destruction. It’s not a one-off, either: it’s followed by the insistent intensity of “Jacked,” a steady crescendo of harrowing post-punk that trembles and shudders at its own sight. But that’s no surprise, given that this album takes for its main inspirations the double sucker-punch of recollections about Orme’s childhood and her “fractured relationship” with her mother, and her own thoughts about war and human suffering.
The whimsy of “Mad Catch” is surprising, then—its spoken-word verses sound, somewhat unfortunately, rather reminiscent of Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.” It’s something of a tonal misstep, while single “Warplane” struggles slightly in the face of its own ambition. The rest of the record, however, captures the sinister nature of that dual inspiration well. In particular, “Extraordinary Wings” and “Celebrate” both glimmer and glower with melodrama and tender pain, while “Smugglers Adventure” is a forlorn, slow-motion trip that builds toward a peak, then makes a sudden left turn toward levity and light, only to return to Vantablack darkness. It all comes to an end with the shapeshifting title track, which veers from a folky acoustic ballad about break-ups to an uptempo lament about mortality and the futility of life, tying together a fascinating and deeply affecting debut.
