Nilüfer Yanya
Dancing Shoes
NINJA TUNE
For a record as creepy, tiny, and intimate as this four-song EP, a title such as Dancing Shoes might seem inane and over-obvious. Then again, everything that’s most integral about the sounds created by London-based songwriter Nilüfer Yanya is off-kilter and off-base, as this immediate follow-up to last September’s My Method Actor album with producer-collaborator Wilma Archer portrays.
Opening with the soft, shoe-shuffling rhythm of “Kneel,” the EP initially seems as tossed-off and effortless as Yanya’s whispery vocals throughout the song’s principal melody—a near-borrow of a Joni Mitchell track from Hejira—until a series of tangled, Frippertronic-esque guitars overpower the track and make its gentility sound more like kink. “Where to Look” is pretty, soulful, and folksy as far as its melody is concerned, with a repetitive web of acoustic guitars and an uneven vocalist just barely lifting her head and her voice above the track’s whirring ambience (“Treason,” the last song on the EP, shares similar moody-misty-folksy traits). What seals the deal here, however, is that quietly slapped industrial drum beat—a stamp-press thud that brings all of the prettiness of “Where to Look” to a halt. On “Treason,” there’s only that nagging electronic backward whir to bother her barely audible text.
Then there’s “Cold Heart,” a summery, blip-bloop anti-love song that if it was louder would easily rival Sabrina Carpenter on the pop charts (maybe barring the song’s guitars, which sound like the result of a violin fucking a bagpipe). But Yanya is an icier, more restrained character than that who knows that “love hurts like hell,” what from her lyrics, and doesn’t sound as if she cares to make that sort of pop racket. Good for her. Bad for her management.
