- After twelve years of tuneful but avant-garde ructions as Pikelet, Evelyn Ida Morris is finally retiring that peculiarly Aussie moniker. I don’t know about you, but for me it produces a jumble of mixed emotions and conflicting thoughts. I think that’s appropriate, because this farewell gesture isn’t at all like what most people mean when they say Goodbye.
The last half-decade has been productive for Morris. I mean, Pikelet has always stuck to a regular release schedule, which is pretty impressive given the timespan in question, but lately that tempo has been ramping up. 2016 heralded the uncompromising and highly polemical record Tronc, pushing feminist and leftwing themes via seven-minute industrial grinds and murky experimentalism. These were intimately linked to the activist work Morris had been doing since co-founding the feminist advocacy organisation LISTEN back in 2014. Not long thereafter Morris came out as a non-binary person, provoking a large outpouring of music, attempting to push the associated storm of emotions into art. These songs were so personal that they didn’t see the light of day until quite a while after composition, last year in fact, when Morris first stepped away from the Pikelet moniker and released a self-titled record under their own name. The style of the album was arrestingly different too: abandoning loop-based experimentalism or the use of a band and unleashing a torrent of neo-classical piano. It was a world removed from the abrasiveness of Tronc, even as it dove into its own torrent of emotional intensity. In so doing it unveiled a hidden side of Morris and a deeply vulnerable one at that. This wasn’t just a questioning of gender identity -wouldn’t that have been enough?- but also a shifting of the philosophical foundations of Morris’ craft, problematising some of their published views on feminism and music.
In the present, it’s a thrilling if wildly uncertain time for Evelyn Ida Morris’ creativity. What’s next? What, after all that, is Goodbye? Beyond the grim conviction of Tronc and the flights of virtuosity in Evelyn Ida Morris it sounds like … a step back in time. It’s a return to a more light-hearted experimentalism you would have heard on records like Calluses, Stem or indeed the original Pikelet album.
I mean, it’s still woke as ****. Lyrically, every song here sits somewhere between a satirical jab and an editorial for The Guardian. For instance, I’ve rarely heard a more insightful analysis of the intransigence of global inequality than the song Exchange Rate, especially not one squeezed into a piano-bar ditty. The line “These lives are too difficult to manage / Those lives are too easy to ignore / So we lie in anxious dissonance / Knowing that safety is a luxury only we can afford” is haunting in its bare-faced, paralysing honesty.
If I’m honest the messages do win out over the immediacy of the music, from the opening bars of Wealthy/Worthy and the insistent repetition of the line “I can’t remember a time when I felt worthy” everything is challenging and not exactly classic pop, with a few exceptions. The chorus of advance single Plovers using an acoustic folk springboard to leap into aching pop-sweetness. You may be brought up short when you realise Morris is crooning “Run for cover! Run for cover! Run for cover!” I think it’s more an ironic stab at the inescapable paranoia which grips folks, rather than a genuine warning about murderous birds. For a long time music, psychology and politics have competed for Morris’ attention and if Goodbye is a wide-angle shot showing everything that’s happened up till now, then Morris is at pains to point out that means you shouldn’t just be listening to the pretty tunes.
Morris has promised us two records this year and Goodbye is a modest EP, referencing much of the political and musical ground that they’ve covered, over the years. To quote them: “[It’s] about saying goodbye to a time when Morris felt they needed a different name, and arriving at their own.” I hope I’m not building up too much hype for the forthcoming record, but in a process of metamorphosis, Goodbye seems less a coda and more an overture: a colourful chrysalis, from which everything that is Evelyn Ida Morris is about to emerge.
- Chris Cobcroft.