Sorry - Cosplay Review
Clever, disconcerting, and dreamlike, Sorry’s Cosplay surprises at every turn.
Alas, we will never know what a David Lynch movie soundtracked by London’s own Sorry would have sounded like, but if you too have toyed with the question, a first listen to their third studio album, Cosplay (out November 7th for Domino), may come very close to providing the answer. There is something in the tone it sets for itself, in the rarefied atmospheres it conjures, and in the unexpected twists and turns it injects into its eleven tracks that makes the listening experience feel close to a mild hallucinatory state. Not that the record feels trippy; more so, it feels like a soundtrack to a dream, or, to the original point, something Lynch never directed but might have wanted to. Sorry have, after all, always been very strong when it came to storytelling through music, although here it is a little bit harder to pinpoint what story is being told. The album’s very title seems to admonish that nothing within is quite exactly what it seems, and fittingly with it, the music too is less straightforward than it was in the band’s two prior studio LPs, although the distinctive voice that makes Sorry’s music immediately recognisable remains the same: just used, here, to different effect.
Where the previous albums led from the gut - 925 was especially visceral, Anywhere But Here deeply emotional - Cosplay again does something unexpected in coming across distinctly guided by the brain. There is something thinly neurotic and mercilessly analytical, both in the lyrics and in the way the sound is curated throughout, that makes it feel like the album is somehow caught in its own head, dragging you in there with it. Part of this lies with the deconstruction of the very musical building blocks Sorry have used in the past as their trademark sounds. ‘Antelope’, for instance, starts off as the familiar kind of mellow, melancholy ballad that makes an appearance in most of their past work; but then the song glitches, distorts, becomes something else altogether, like the dropping, albeit temporary, of a mask. ‘Love Posture’ has the serrated rhythms of some of the band’s early demos, but brought to a greater maturity, with a depth that makes it feel intense and unsettling. ‘JIVE’, not by chance the closing track on the record, seems at first to go back to a more classic structure, only to left-turn into something unexpected once again, leaving the door open to the unanswerable question of what a future album from this band might sound like.
Even when the innovative elements are less prominent, the record feels like it has attained a maturity that is the product of self-awareness even more than of greater confidence. ‘Candle’ is a good example of this: a track that plays cleverly with words and chords alike, imbued with the kind of sharp irony that can only be conveyed through the starkly straight-faced delivery Asha Lorenz is giving us here. The lyrics are on point throughout the album, full of imagery that feels in turn haunting, airily poetic, bitter-laugh-inducing. This too has always been a strength with this band, but it is more polished now, doing more with less. There is less here of the interplay between the vocals from Lorenz and fellow band founder Louis O’Bryen, and that is perhaps missed: when it comes to the forefront, as in ‘Life In This Body’, a track that feels like a maudlin modern-day siren song, it does so to great effect. It feels like an element that in places got lost in the mix of the many things the record, no doubt an ambitious one, was attempting to do.
Elsewhere the album is doing something new altogether, and this is perhaps where it feels most fully realised. Opening track ‘Echoes’ is a warning that something different is happening here, from its very first bars, with its impressionistic handling of sound and its deliberately disorienting structure. ‘Today Might Be The Hit’ comes completely unexpected as a Sorry song, and this might be precisely why it hits so hard, incorporating elements drawn from blues and Americana in a cavalcade of a track that feels like Fontaines D.C. should cover it someday. ‘Waxwing’, easily the standout track in the album, is a tense, layered mirror-house of a song where the clever use of light distortion and the shift in pitch of the vocals makes that lucid dream feeling come across the strongest.
For a record that is doing so many things at once, and doing them from a remarkably analytical point of view, it is almost surprising that Cosplay feels as cohesive as it does, and this is perhaps its most surprising achievement. One might have expected it from a band that even from their debut came out the gates with a fully formed idea of what their voice sounded like, but it is still impressive considering how much that voice has morphed and evolved through time. If this album makes one thing clear, it is that Sorry are setting the bar for themselves higher and higher with each new effort, even as the risks this entails also become greater. Here those risks feel like they have been averted, through meticulous attention to detail but also through a sincerity that comes through both in the lyrics and in the delivery. All of Sorry’s music, after all, has always felt like a form of self-portraiture: here it just takes the form of a portrait of the many masks one wears.