FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Charli XCX - how I’m feeling now
___________
THINKING back to last…
PHOTO CREDIT: Huck Kwong
year and artists who were releasing albums that were made in the early stages of lockdown/quarantine, it has led me to Charli XCX. The Cambridge-born Charlotte Aitchison is one of this country’s most outstanding songwriters and extraordinary artists. Taking Pop in new directions, she grows as a writer on every album. Last year’s how I’m feeling now was rightly nominated for a Mercury Prize – it lost out to Michael Kiwanuka’s KIWANUKA. This year’s shortlist has fewer Pop albums; it is quite a different look and feel to last year. Regardless of it not winning the award, the critical reception to the album was immensely positive. Released on 15th May, 2020, it arrived only eight months after her previous album, Charli. The sublime how I’m feeling now was conceived during the lockdown and made in a D.I.Y. collaborative process with her fans in the span of six weeks. Recording in quarantine was a new experience for every artist. Charli XCX rose to the challenge and produced what is, arguably, her finest and most complete record. It is an album that you need to grab on vinyl. This is what Rough Trade say about how I’m feeling now:
“Now in 2020, Charli is already breaking boundaries - this year has seen her first BRIT nomination for British Female Solo Artist, marking a huge moment of validation from a mainstream audience that Charli has built on her own terms. The new album was written, recorded and released in 39 days, completely in self-isolation.
The creative process was also to push her collaborative stream in a unique way; opening up the recording, writing, artwork, music videos and more to fans for feedback and contribution - she also further inspired her fans’ creativity, allowing them access to song stems to create remixes and greenscreen footage to be edited using their own imagination.
How I’m Feeling Now has given further spotlight to Charli’s status as one of the most adaptable, exciting pop artists working today, and through it’s uniquely collaborative approach, provided a shared space for those who listen to feel safe enough to express themselves however they wish at a time when they need it most”.
I am hoping to get the album on vinyl soon myself. It is an album with no weak spots at all. I especially love the songs, claws and party 4 u. Before I get to some reviews of how I’m feeling now, there is an interview that I want to source from - just that we can get some perspective from Charli XCX herself.
In May of last year, The Guardian spoke with Charli XCX about her stunning new album and how she was getting on. There are some bits from the interview that I want to quote:
“Partying has been Aitchison’s biggest source of inspiration; no one is better at crystallising the invincible highs or lonely lows of a night out. Now the dancefloors are dimmed, she has only the inside of her four mock-Tudor walls to play with. The entire household is hostage to the album: she lives with her two best friends from school, who are also her managers, and Huck Kwong, a video game producer and her on-off boyfriend of seven years. “It’s a cult kind of vibe,” she admits. The lounge has become a recording studio. The artwork for her single Forever was photographed in her bedroom. She exercises and directs her own photoshoots (like this one) in the space outside. Lockdown is the longest she and Kwong have spent together, she says, and it’s been good to write about it. It’s also been weird, “yelling about my relationship into a microphone while my boyfriend’s in the other room, doing a puzzle”.
When it comes to collaborating with fans, Aitchison says she has been surprised by the way they have gravitated towards the deeper stuff – not the parties and fast cars. “I suppose I was always afraid to show that side of myself,” she says. But sharing everything has its downsides: one day, she posted lyrics on Twitter and fans thought they were so bad, they were a joke. “Then I posted funny, fake lyrics to troll myself and they were like, ‘This is sick!’ I thought, ‘Oh no!’” (She didn’t use them.)
Yet watching her work out in the open, it’s also clear that Aitchison makes every creative decision. When she mentions her work-guilt, I suggest that nobody could say she hasn’t worked for her success. “Well, thanks,” she says glumly. “I don’t know – sometimes the story isn’t always portrayed…” She trails off. What does she mean? “There’s always a misconception about female pop artists. That’s just the unfortunate truth: ‘Did they write their own songs? Do they have their own opinions? Did they really make that decision?’” Everyone from Joni Mitchell to Björk has complained of the same scepticism.
Aitchison’s DIY ethos has been there since she started playing raves at 15. Her parents would drive her from their home in Bishop’s Stortford to Hackney warehouses, where she shrieked about dinosaur sex in a peroxide wig while they waited to drive her home. “Playing in those more underground environments, and being exposed to fashion and LGBTQ+ culture – that was the first time I felt truly inspired to my core,” she says. “It was like I’d opened Pandora’s box.” She was signed by Atlantic Records off the back of those shows, and her early releases revamped a gothic pop that had lain dormant since the 1980s (think Shakespears Sister and Depeche Mode). Prior to the pandemic, she had mooted a tour of her 2013 debut album, True Romance. “It was one of the first things I really got stuck into – a lot of experimentation and figuring things out as they went along,” she explains. “Kind of a similar time to now.”
How I’m Feeling Now already has one important legacy. Aitchison says she has been surprised by how fast her label have moved to get it out, and plans to release two more albums this year. Next time around, if they stall, she’s got this ace in her pocket to remind them that anything is possible: “No, guys, remember when we did that album in six weeks? No rules – let’s go”.
There was a raff of effusive reviews for how I’m feeling now! One only need to listen to a song or two to realise why it was revered and respected by so many. This is what CLASH wrote in their review:
“Her humanoid vocals on ‘Detonate’ are reminiscent of Kate Bush’s ‘Deeper Understanding’ from her ‘Directors Cut’ album, and explore the romance of the robotic - alien yet strangely familiar. This track resonates hard though its lyrical vulnerability accompanied by lighter production. Its classic warped auto-tune is ever-present but dialled down to be an overall more accessible pop song. ‘Detonate’s’ tight lyricism contrasts with the repetitive lyrics of ‘7 years’, which feels rushed in places, “Oh yeah, it's really, really, really, really nice / And now I never, ever, ever think twice” leaving moments which fall flat.
‘party 4 u’ is a moment of respite amongst the brilliant chaos, allowing us to take a breath, while ‘c2.0’ (co-written by lawless Estonian rapper Tommy Cash) sounds like a laptop overheating and my hairdryer exploding all at once. The album peaks and troughs, the single tracks standing out while others can be glossed over more easily, yet throughout the abrasive jolting and glitching, one thing remains constant, a solid pop chorus with catchy melodies.
The album closes with 'visions': a brilliant illustration of A. G. Cook's genius all too reminiscent of leaving a sweaty club as the sun comes up. The heavy beats and sirens evoke a memory which usually I do not intend to remember, yet in lockdown circumstances, leaves me pining for it once again, and therefore wanting more of the album itself. As her opening line of the album states “I just wanna go real hard” accompanied by a sense of impending doom, I sigh and think to myself: me too Charli, me too.
‘how i’m feeling now’ is essentially a series of android love letters; to her relationship (and how it has grown throughout lockdown), to her fans (whom she has involved every step of the way), her friends and contributors, and to herself, as she has opened up about mental health during the lockdown, and the fear of how to continue once it is over, with lyrics pondering whether she is deserving of love. This directly contrasts with boasting her rarity as a ‘pink diamond’ in the first track.
Charli starts and ends with hard disorienting club bangers, leaving the middle of the album space to expose her tenderness and vulnerability while still retaining her futuristic, unpredictable sound and penchant for an irresistible pop hook”.
To finish off, I want to quote from CRACK. Every review had its own perspective and reasons for loving how I’m feeling now. Here is CRACK’s take:
“On Charli XCX’s self-described quarantine album how i’m feeling now, her field of view has never been more vast. Drawing from UK garage, trap, bubblegum pop and well-after-midnight techno, XCX’s fourth full-length interrogates, questions and opens up space within what might otherwise feel like the most claustrophobic period in many of our lives.
A product of conversations with fans online, written and produced through broadcasts and in collaboration with a range of artists including Mechatok, A.G. Cook and Dylan Brady of 100 gecs, how i’m feeling now is full of love songs, but it’s not a love letter to any one person or place. Streets, parks, and sidewalks have become battlegrounds, and our increasingly interior lives are mediated by the pressure to share them with those in our vicinity. Now, our experiences of this period are characterised by who we see: the people we live with by choice or coincidence, the people we work with, those we’d love to see, but can’t or won’t. how i’m feeling now is an album about longing, loneliness, and what comes next.
Whereas Pop 2, Number 1 Angel, and Charli leaned heavily into a curated pick-n-mix of guest stars and cameos, how i’m feeling now returns to Charli XCX alone, with the artist playing her own supporting cast. On c2.0 she flips Click off of Charli into something more interstellar, more dissociative, and more breathlessly dizzying than the original. Stripped of traded verses with guest vocalists, how i’m feeling now hones in on Charli XCX’s voice and songwriting at its most tender and reflective.
Here, Charli XCX has taken on a formidable task. The album is, by definition, an archive of both quarantine conditions and of, well, how she feels within them. What’s incredible is how effective of an archive it is. The album’s extended outro captures the feeling of blurry looks across a crowded dancefloor, but also the restless nostalgia of not knowing when we’ll share these intimate moments again”.
Go and get Charli XCX’s fourth studio album. I am not sure what she has planned in terms of new music and whether we may get another album in the next year or so. After such a busy 2019 and 2020, she is more than justified in taking things a bit easy for a while! Rather than how I’m feeling now being the sound of lockdown and the start of the pandemic, it is an emotive and honest album from an artist combing some deep truths with incredible hooks and compositional moments. Experimental Pop at its very best and freshest! Hear for yourself and go and get…
THE epic how I’m feeling now.