aya - Hexed! Review
An existential crisis, wrapped in a night out to a grotty club that ends at a suburban garage.
And I don’t just say garage because of the suburban feel that this album emanates. Like how Burial captured the malaise of noughties London, aya presents a true dyed-in-the-wool 21st Century view on things. It’s not an album that looks for the beautiful inside the “crumbling high rise.” Instead, it states that the world, and its relation to the artist, is totally fucked. The world is full of strange characters which aren’t portrayed as innocent souls tamped down by a lack of interpersonal relations and urban decay, but broken people born into a broken world. aya herself is not free from this brokenness, either.
It’s an album right from the start that’s about movement, the transference of place and of identity, and how if you can’t nail down either, they both pivot about one another, free-floating. Ladybarn, Queens Road, and Ladbroke Grove are mentioned in succession, the first teleporting you across the breadth of central Manchester, and then the suburb of Ladbroke Grove. The disassociation in this album makes you feel like your “eyes [are getting] hot” yourself. There’s a real poignancy in the closeness of the images, like everything is being viewed in fragments that are only appreciable like a Brakhage-esque film.
The way that aya twists language is amazing. Some of the phrasings are poetry. Even the blunt “lickin stickin pickin” in Navel Gazer really sets the tone for the rest of the song. The unbothered aya is absolutely losing her shit and ripping into someone for being a single-issue voter, expressing her rage that someone could be so unbothered by the rest of the world that they are allowed to just stare at their own shoes and not realise there was anything outside of them. But then again, the album’s subject is about this kind of lack of perspective — getting on a train and getting off it later, not really knowing what happened in the interim. These songs highlight a difference between someone so engrossed in the world they don’t know what to think of it, and someone so distant that they don’t care about it. It’s an interesting distinction, and a testament to aya’s poetic ability.
However, the songs Hexed! and The Petard Is My Hoister really take the flow out of the album. Since there are relatively lengthy sparse instrumental intros to most of the songs, the fact that these are long, sparse instrumentals just slows the whole thing down too much. There’s not a lot of runtime (34 minutes), so these songs (collectively 8 minutes) really eat into the potential of this piece. They’re decent, but perhaps worthy of appending spoken-word lyrics to? Because that’s the thing that I’d argue aya does best. She’s spoken about really liking “heartbreaking ambient record[s]” produced by some of her friends up in Manchester. And while perhaps those ambient breaks would have served as interesting counterpoints to DJing, they end up as weird interludes that only accentuate some of the more aggressive production on the record.
Overall, this is a lyrically amazing record, full of introspection and tight versecraft, minus a few over-rhymed segments and cringeworthy puns (“differential / an ex is just a change over time”, “bunged up speaking phlegmish”). The production is so good that I thought there were noises coming from outside of my headphones several times, even when I was totally engrossed in it. It’s very strange. The only thing that took me out of this album were the interludes. I’m usually a big fan of tonal shifts, but this felt more like whiplash.