Last week, London’s Duke of York’s theatre played host to an elaborate four-night live staging of Self Esteem’s third album. Devised bySelf Esteemherself – Rebecca Lucy Taylor – along with Tony award-winning theatrical director and designer Tom Scutt, it was rapturously received by critics, and seemed to speak of an entirely understandable confidence on Taylor’s part.
Since 2017, she has completely reinvented herself, from one half of middle-ranking indie duo Slow Club into an on-her-own-terms pop star. Her second album as Self Esteem, 2021’sPrioritise Pleasure, was a critical and commercial success, shifting her into the realm of breakfast TV interviews and appearances on The Graham Norton Show and Celebrity Bake-Off. She also has a burgeoning career as an actor, having played Sally Bowles in a West End production of Cabaret opposite Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears. Her success has meant that, on Prioritise Pleasure’s follow-up, she was finally afforded a recording budget sufficient to do what she always wanted: grand ambitions involving choirs and orchestras.
But, by her own account, the making of A Complicated Woman was fraught. Taylor was racked with self-doubt and plagued by twin worries: that if it took too long to make, her career would lose momentum, and that at 38, she was too old to be a pop star anyway. She apparently considered quitting music entirely.
Some of those concerns have evidently seeped into the songs. The music on A Complicated Woman reaches for feelgood stadium singalongs, evokes sweaty dancefloors and aims itself at the dead centre of 21st-century mainstream pop. There are moments where the lyrics match the sound: 69 combines distorted rave-era-evoking beats and an explicit checklist of what Taylor does and doesn’t enjoy in bed (winningly, given that it variously mentions pegging, scissoring and the reverse cowgirl position, it was released as a single); Mother’s grimy house pulse is topped with a blistering dismissal of a self-absorbed ex that contains the impressively sick burn: “Are you interested in growing? There is other literature outside of The Catcher in the Rye.” But for the most part, the songs thrash about and contradict themselves as if Taylor is, right in front of your ears, working out exactly how she feels about ageing, drinking or her career.
This approach sometimes feels brave and fascinating – The Curse’s examination of a complex relationship with alcohol is affectingly realistic and relatable, declining to resort to either wellness bromides or let’s-party nihilism. But sometimes it feels confusingly opaque. The tellingly titled I Do and I Don’t Care revisits the spoken-word approach of her breakthrough single I Do This All the Time, but in place of that song’s chord-striking list of sexist remarks there’s a brain-dump stream of consciousness. It’s tough to work out what she’s driving at, whether the song’s string-laden conclusion (“We’re not chasing happiness any more, girls / We’re chasing nothing / The great big still / The deep blue OK”) is positive or incredibly bleak.
To which Taylor might reasonably respond: that’s the point, stupid. This is anthemic-sounding music about ambiguity, perhaps striving to bond people together without providing pat answers in deeply uncertain times. She has mentioned Elbow’s reliably roof-raising One Day Like This as a model for part of the album’s sound and you can hear its influence in the massed vocals and swelling orchestration that liberally pepper A Complicated Woman. But you’re occasionally struck by the sense that it’s trying a little too hard to rouse its audience into a mass singalong. There are moments when the choir arrives and you think “them again?” – closer The Deep Blue Okay marries them to a fidgety piano line and ends up sounding like a cross between LCD Soundsystem’s All My Friends and something off The Greatest Showman soundtrack, a deeply peculiar cocktail. The likes of Mother, or the noisy Nadine Shah-featuring Lies, are more powerful for the choir’s absence.
A Complicated Woman is a bold experiment that you couldn’t call a failure – there are good things there, that underline how vastly improved the world of pop is for having Self Esteem in it – but doesn’t always come off with the efficacy Taylor might have hoped. As the reviews of the Duke of York’s show suggest, it might well work better live, aided by the fact that Taylor is a fantastic performer – you can easily imagine Cheers to Me’s defiant coda (“but mostly cheers to me”) being bellowed back at the stage by a vast crowd, taking on a new potency in the process. Its author has recently talked about pursuing her acting career further: perhaps A Complicated Woman belongs on the stage too.A Complicated Woman by Self Esteem is released by Polydor on 25 April
Lady Wray – Be a Witness
Lady Wray continues to pilot her own peculiar path through soul music: Be a Witness is lush, summery and synth-heavy, but intriguingly lo-fi, as if it were recorded off the radio decades ago.