The album cover suggests as much: Oonagh Haines has an overflowing imagination. Her penchant for surreal, often sarcastic thought games, into which she places many an unexpected swerve, flashes through, for instance, in the extremely slowed-down opening track »Loaded Gun«. Here, she amalgamates dark R&B, cloud rap, grime and minimalist beats into a dragging sound.
In a pitched-down, thus lowered and, moreover, Auto-Tune-soaked voice, she tells of a loaded gun lying on the bedside table in case she has to deal with an intruder. The punchline of this parody, however, is that it is there so she can quickly shoot herself before any confrontation takes place. On »Kindness«, twisted sound effects create a playful impression – fitting for lyrics in which she longs for a person who meets life with openness. Yet distance shimmers through even in this comparatively optimistic track, not least through the artificial-sounding vocals.
Again and again, Haines works with fractures: with reduced beats, she manages the balancing act of sounding lethargic while still being strongly focused on rhythm. The deconstruction of genre conventions and an off-kilter humour run like a thread through this debut album.
