SOPHIE / Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides


What do you say if they ask you what is the nexus between Madonna and 'Ghost In The Shell'? After listening to 'Oil of Every Pearl's Un-insides', you can come up with an answer: SOPHIE. The last track is impregnated with a futuristic, paranoid and post-apocalyptic atmosphere in the purest style 'Ghost In The Shell' or 'Deus Ex' and, although 'Whole New World/Pretend World' is undoubtedly the most inaccessible piece on the album (you might like 'It's Okay to Cry'), or even the brute 'Ponyboy', and that on the other hand frightens you this trip -we'll delve into this concept later- of almost ten minutes), is also the most representative of SOPHIE and of what it proposes. It is not surprising that he chose it to close his debut album: nine minutes and a half where the distorted parts are mixed to the unintelligible intoned by SOPHIE, the noventiary lament of "I looked into your eyes, I thought that I could see a whole new world", the almost childish part of "whole! New! World! Whole! New! World!", and even an interlude that could also serve as a thread for 'Interstellar' spacetime journeys. This structure, more than chaotic, could be described as fluctuating, and in fact it is that idea of the slamming door to the binary, to the established, that idea of flowing, one of the great constants of SOPHIE, and the main one in this album.
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'Oil of Every Pearl's Un-insides' serves much more as a debut than 'Product', and not only for its duration: it seems that here we are much closer to the personal universe of its author. Product' was a collection of very powerful singles -and others not so much-, but all cut by a similar pattern (very different to other proposals, but similar to each other); here, on the other hand, we have a closer representation of the level of what the production company wants to offer us. This is her most brutal and continuous facet with respect to 'Product' and her previous work, as we can see in 'Not Okay', 'Faceshopping' and the especially remarkable 'Ponyboy', but there's also 'Immaterial', the little jewel sung by Cecile Believe that mixes Madonna with 2150 (that "we live in 2018 but this person lives in 2068" could be applied here). Our colleague Jordi Bardají already told you extensively about her , qualifying her as a "hymn", and he was not wrong.
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And there are also other tracks where the author of such beasts as 'HARD' or 'LEMONADE' (or the ideas that many still denigrate 'Bitch I'm Madonna') is delivered to places where we did not think to see her. 'It's Okay to Cry' surprised us a few months ago because the hitherto so wrapped up in SOPHIE secrecy, point one, showed itself physically, and point two, did so in a vulnerable way, both externally through nudity and internally when talking about intimacy and how it deals with what torments it, all with a celestial air that envelops the subject. Daring to take the step, and the insecurities of that second just before jumping, seems to be also the theme of 'Is It Cold in the Water?', that if they tell me it's from Björk or Arca I believe it, just as if they tell me that 'Infatuation' is from Aphex Twin (although in this second case the result is more discreet).
We are therefore facing a much more cohesive job than 'Product', and "Oil" is much more than an introduction to the bubblegum bass: it is directly a journey through the parallel world of SOPHIE (we say again that it lives several centuries ahead). A trip that is a real roller coaster where the Scottish gives us a warm welcome ('It's Okay to Cry'), takes us little to the top ('Ponyboy' and 'Faceshopping'), gives us a little calm ('Is It Cold in the Water?Infatuation'), another ascent ('Not Okay'), and "takes care of us" using an ambient of almost six minutes ('Pretending') waiting for us to attend what as we say seems to be his anthem ('Immaterial'). The final aim of this journey is to derail us in the last mentioned theme, which takes the wagon to a much more abstract journey. Before we talked about 'Interstellar', but really it would be more the spatiotemporal journey of (don't kill me the purists for making this comparison) '2001: An odyssey in space': psychedelically wonderful for some, unbearable for others. SOPHIE's proposal is at times very risky, possibly misunderstood and, although this is a cliché, ahead of its time. If tomorrow SOPHIE confesses that it is a robot, I would believe it, but much less than at the time of 'Product', because within all the artificiality sought in this album, there is a layer of humanity. Even if it's an immaterial humanity.

Qualification: 8,5/10
You'll like it if you like it : Björk, PC Music, Charli XCX, Hannah Diamond, Aphex Twin, Arca. Or cyberpunk dystopias.
The best : 'It's Okay to Cry', 'Immaterial', 'Ponyboy', 'Whole New World / Pretend World', 'Is It Cold in the Water?'
Listen to him: Spotify

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