(Young Turks)Tahliah Barnett moves further into abstraction on this personal, painstaking and wildly adventurous record
The rise of FKA twigs is one of the most intriguing in modern pop. It has not been an ascent to dizzying commercial success: her releases sell respectably rather than astonishingly. It’s more about the acclaim she’s achieved. Rock and pop stars of any stripe usually struggle to convince the world that they’re actually polymath geniuses; FKA twigs – AKA Tahliah Barnett – seems to have been accepted as one from the start. In the five years since her debut album, she has diversified into everything from arty webzines in which she features as a comic strip superhero called Anomalie to starring in a commercial for
Apple directed by Spike Jonze. Live, she frequently spends more time engaged in choreography than actually singing, as if
music is a secondary pursuit to abstract tap-dancing and demonstrating her mastery of sword-based kung fu. Her videos aren’t just promotional items but exercises in visual art with mini-documentaries attached, explaining the practice behind them.