Some things just sell themselves; and when you are the daughter of L.A. based #47 DJ Mag’s top 100 DJs poll, DJ Shogun who’s had a prolific and profitable career, it creates fertile ground for continued musical feats and the selling of cultural products. This is where about all of my reservations going into the record end. I am assuming that it is daddy Shogun who loaded all the different sounds into his daughter’s Native Instruments, allowing her full freedom to experiment with whichever sounds they collectivably came up with. This allowed her to focus on different parts of song-writing, giving a particular coherency to the sound and her technical expertise. I.e. A novel expression in the cultural epicentre of the world’s still dominant empire.
Released on the California based Dome of Doom, Laleani gifts us Fantastic Planet. For me this is one of the exhilarating days on which you discover an artist or a record which immediately upsets your whole being, the sounds and lyrics resonates with your past, present and future. There is a nice French word for this ‘bouleverser’, freely translated it amounts to rolling the ball around. This is exactly what this record does and it fills me with joy. Where to start? The album cover features a bird, symbol of freedom and associated with freedom and reproduction (for isn’t it the stork which delivers the babies?) – however it’s a human bird, or a human dressed up as a bird, indicating the malleability of humanness, and features often described as ‘human’ or ‘natural’. The cover is red, pointing towards love and passion. And there appear flowers, a sign of innocence and beauty; as well as frailty and ultimate decay.
The title and subscript seem to indicate that Laleani is an alien, something which comes from another planet, from another time-space and is as such figured ‘outside’, outside reality, and that is also the discomforting thing about her lyrics, they seem almost exclusively to recount aligning dreams with reality. Equally referring to our own planet, which is not that fantastic for most, let alone for the ecology, something which is also structurally formulated outside the economic, yet which is a great place to be when you are part of the ‘inside’ aka the developed world.
Immediately from the title you get a somewhat eerie feeling of contradiction. The overarching theme in the music seems to be these contradictory terms: playfulness and respect, desires and restraints, dreams and reality, idealism and materialism. This album is contradictory in the many lyrical twists it orchestrates, yet the contradiction to me would be that I do not experience these contradictions as such, it is just another stepping stone in post-modernity, voicing exactly what I have come to accept. Stabbing instrumentalized others in the back, self-blame, … This is a recognition of capitalisms capacity to unite seeming idealistic contradictions, by using, …, materialism. But also how this desire to change the world ends up changing you, unless you remain an alien on the outside of course.
To me this whole album is one big reference to the contemporary cultural exhumes of capitalism; turning things upside down, up to even intestines, coming from a nineteen-year-old this is far from an innocent adolescent altercation! Did Marx not turn Hegel upside down? This is serious attempt at turning the ideas of capitalism upside down again, or showing their resistance to such operations. This album also drips in theses on Feuerbach and Bourdieu’s structuration theory, using contemporaneity to debunk or justify claims to the past. It is the playful stream-of-conscious singing style which really manifests this album and pierces through marrow and bone. When Laleani braids alliterations together with a different meaning in the following sentence and the next such as in Broken “You’re just a heartless, broken, piece of broken pieces”, or Slow on the Weekend “You know that I’m just slow, I’ll stay on the low so I can save my soul, oh”; it’s so simple and effective. She also handles themes such as taking peace with the unchangeability of the world and the roots of evil, which never appear clearly, and oftentimes end up being turned inward. Referring to things such as broken dreams, forced habits, frantically trying to ‘fix’ our own place in this (rotten) world and feelings of being small yet having big dreams of change. All-in-all this album grafts perfectly on to the youth climate protests going in the EU right now and the apparent generational conflict taking shape more and more but which needs to be amused on to the younger generation in relation to its amusing itself to death. Trees has the allure of Björk’s earlier work as her ominous voice begs for change.
The instrumentals are diverse and the album plays around with a number of rhythms and templates, yet there is a clear theme and it is all tied together coherently. The main sound is synth driven, minimalistic, and sometimes solos seem to have been stolen from a Mario cassette in their playfulness, Laleani does not shy away from sounds which, only a few years prior would have been a no-go zone for pop musicians. Nonetheless the percussion is on point and really defines each number and the album’s contemporaneity, not to mention the pacing. With many current influences such as staple use of high heads (vaporwave/trap) and punky guitars. It succeeds in trimming them all down to their bare minimums and then applying Laleani’s penetrating vocals and piercing lyrics. She uses the guitar to stir that 90s Lemonheads or Weezer vibe, furthermore her howling in Seas of Mars reminds me of The Pixies. Her voice also reminds me of “the Knife” who also cooperated with Röyksopp, somehow it is also reminiscent of “Little Dragon”, there are many faint memories regarding for example LCD Soundsystem as well, in the use of synths to drive the song forward as successfully, and also the Ghentian DEEWEE label run by the Dewaele Brothers which is heavily synth and percussion driven.
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