Chloe Alison Escott: Stars Under Contract

- The poignant, even devastating Stranger Than Death, appeared earlier this year as one of the standout moments in Chapter Music’s excellent Midnight Meditations compilation. It appears again on the new album Stars Under Contract, as one of the songs here that most intimately explores Chloe Alison Escott’s trans experience. The piano chords are both tumbledown and proud, like broken columns rising out of a classical ruin, as Escott, at once dignified and heartbreakingly plaintive proclaims: “There’s something coming and it’s stranger than death.” You know it's profound but -even after Chloe handed over some of the decryption keys, admitting in interview with Raven Sings The Blues that this is a discussion of gender transition- as the lyrics themselves suggest, the experience must remain to some degree, incomprehensible. Perhaps there’s an element of this running through everything on this new record: a journey of magical sublimation, a transformative act which our language and culture is not really able to encapsulate.

Delving into Escott’s writing, be it as a solo artist, or with Tasmanian post-punks The Native Cats, there’s a cryptic quality to her lyricism that, well, it really makes me work to understand what she’s on about. I had thought that her latest, Stars Under Contract, with its gales of emotive piano and wistful singing was just primed for a flood of confessional songwriting. Well it is and it isn’t. The record is a very personal examination of Escott’s journey, finding herself as a trans woman, but it is precisely her journey and you only get to glimpse those parts of it she chooses to unveil.

One thing Escott has told us, I’m not sure it helps to unpick the record, but it does really gel with its mood: she imagined all these songs here as originally being rock songs from her rock star back catalogue when she was in a hit band, now reimagined in the style of John Cale’s Fragments Of A Rainy Season; only the band Escott has in mind never existed and there are no other versions of these songs. Faux-concept-record or whatever, Stars Under Contract has exactly that late career mixture of sophistication and regret. It’s clear from even the briefest contact with the album that it is, as it has been described, a work of ‘elegance and pain’.

Even in the absence of true understanding, that gentility keeps reappearing. The verses may remain opaque to me, but it’s impossible not to comprehend the touching empathy of the titular and repeated chorus line: “I know the soul by its presence in others / I know the soul by its presence in others / I know the soul by its presence in all others.” There are other moods too, like the rage of Hooks In Texas. The song is a surreal and gonzo monologue as Escott trips through the lone star state. Her psychedelic take on the culture wars is bizarre but rarely less than ferocious. Oh and when she bellows “I see hooks in Texas ascending!” before you get carried away by terrifying visions of meat hooks pinned to progressives, let me fill you in: those hooks belong, apparently, to Texan political journalist Christopher Hooks whose astute Twitter commentary somehow morphed into a vision of the entire state being lifted, on fishing tackle, into the sky, which is a metaphor for the Texas Secession Movement; oh Chloe!

In fact there are many moods writhing through Stars Under Contract. I hear jealousy and raw lust in Pour Vos Amants Inaccessible “You always were a boy of the notches.” I hear world weary, satirical smirking in There’s Money In The Basement. “There’s heaven, there is earth, there’s money in the basement.” Perhaps more often than anything else I hear the knowing, rueful, half-smile of Permanent Thief: “I stole with my eyes, I stole for myself / And then I stole it right back on to the shelf / I never wanted to be ...a permanent thief.”

There’s a lot to Stars Under Contract: some of it surreal, some of it made-up and some of it very movingly real. Much of it remains only guessed at, necessarily incomprehensible, because this is Chloe Alison Escott’s journey and -with a wink and that half smile- that’s the way she wants it to be.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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