- Emma Kelly, otherwise known as Happy Axe, always manages to be a little bit different, even from the already left-field artists like Julianna Barwick, Julia Holter, Björk or Jenny Hval, whose sounds have contributed quite a lot to her own. She says “I want to invite adventurousness or even a kind of defiance - a confidence to break out of expectations and do or be something different.” Incorporating violin, vocals, beat making, production and bowed-saw (particularly that last one), being different was never going to be much of a challenge. Be that as it may, on her debut full-length, Dream Punching, Happy Axe makes difference an unequivocal virtue.
It’s a little ironic, in light of this, that most of the stylistic blueprint for the LP was established back on her 2015 EP, This Topia. Loops of violin and saw are the melodic and rhythmic building blocks, layered into songs. The one-woman-and-her-loop-pedal formula has long been established and is a great way for a single musician to produce a lot of music. There is a small danger of your project always sounding like a pyramid of loops canon-ing off into infinity. On This Topia the beauty Kelly manages to wring from her instruments is undeniable and, especially after her various studio treatments, I’d never accuse of sounding formulaic. However the most striking innovation of her new album is how much more open the song structure is than before.
Turning the heavy, claustrophobic layers of harmony that open the record into a suffocating beat is almost the opposite of looping. You’re not given long to think about it, as that airless environment opens up into the eerie surges of saw and strings that populate Cheshire Heart. A melancholy ode to some lover whose “Chesire heart, won’t see how we’ve grown.” Kelly’s voice is much more prevalent on this record and, though quiet and tentative, is one of the most pleasant instruments in the mix. An instrument is a good way to think of it since diction and thus comprehension don’t seem very important to her; only the occasional phrase comes floating clearly out from amongst the scattered beats and echoing murk, “[something, something] / Night after night we fall to our beds.” Well, that works.
The saw and the fiddle again intertwine, endlessly, across the record. Despite the echoing reverb and production chicanery there’s an undeniably organic, full-blooded, life-like quality, that you get at full blast in the lushness of a single like Seven Sounds. The way those naturalistic qualities are played off against the artificial elements is most effective. The soaring strings are backed with a clearly tweaked and spine-trembling bass before the skittering beats arrive to structure the ambient excess. I think there are a series of clever oppositions at work across Dream Punching: the looped versus the live, structured beats against formless ambience, harmonic sweetness versus haunting noise, the organic and the synthetic.
Happy Axe’s adventurousness is sometimes an explosion of rich, strange sound and sometimes an intellect working with quietly deceptive assiduousness. The result fits comfortably with and compares favourably to her stylistic co-travellers (a small handful of whom are from Australia: McKisko, Ela Stiles, Medicine Voice, we could do with more like these) but is, especially, now very much its own.
- Chris Cobcroft.