Review

Cindytalk

Wappinschaw

Dais • 2021

Drunk with hot fury for experimentation, Cindytalk have been cutting through just about every style with the post prefix for almost four decades now: punk, industrial, noise rock, minimalism, electroacoustic ambient, improvisations of any kind, you name it! In shreds it all hangs down on this music and lasts through the trend cycles. The inner life of founding member and singer Cindy (aka Gordon) Sharp is laid wide open as a battlefield, where own laws, own weapons hold the interpretive sovereignty. Collaborations with This Mortal Coil, the Cocteau Twins, Duran Duran, Somatic Responses or Massimo Pupillo (as Becoming Animal) helped Sharp and her changing comrades-in-arms to a kind of iconic status in the UK music underground, but their eclectic signatures remained largely unknown. Perhaps the only exception was 1994’s »Wappinschaw«, the last Cindytalk album for the time being, which was to be followed a good 15 years later by a series of electronic releases via Editions Mego. The transit from the avant-garde guitar sound of the late eighties to Peter Rehberg’s laptop experiment: already present here and as predictably unpredictable as everything about this project. Cindytalk’s show of weapons is accordingly an urgent, wildly flailing statement of mental turmoil, tracing bipolarities amidst weird sounds rather than songs, feverishly seeking an exit. Spoiler: It remains closed until the end. No matter how and how long the seething end-time punk of »Return To Pain« or the insane offbeat ritual »Disappear« massage the mind, which scenarios the surreal drone of »Traumlose Nächte« or the androgynous ballad »Prince Of Lies« tattoo on it – once you have grasped this album, for you it remains living accompanying music of your own biography.