Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7.5/10
The appearance and aroma of toxicity is in all of us, across the gender divide, across political division, through class, culture and philosophy, even if we preach and display idealism, compassion, empathy, in some small way we are capable of being the most toxic person in a room at one time or another.
Such is the depth of our personality, the understanding that we are more than just a single line joke delivered by the eternal jester, that we are complex and complicated, that we are capable of beautiful highs, and intolerable lows, and that in someone else’s story, we are the villain given many names, “There is such and such, Alias The Devil“.
Nobody should be satisfied with being one dimensional, and yet there are many to whom such a role is perfect as it leads them not into confrontation, just a comfortable belief that is never deconstructed, never broken down to reveal its true face of the dull and beige, the simple and the underwhelming.
Toxic is just another way of saying you have layers, they might not all be virtuous, kind, willing to help an old lady across the road, but they, like creativity in all its guises, offer a different view to the masterpiece being created by the sculptor, even it relishes in being named anything other than something pure and reasonable, the assumed name is meant to highlight the flaw in the marble to which any Shy Girl can call out with reason.
It is to Shy Girl that the songs that make up their new E.P., Alias, act as a receptor and a mirror of society, whether through the agony of energy that flows through the tracks Twelve, Slime, Freak, Tasty, Leng, Bawdy and Siren, or as a lasting reminder of the electronic heart which has a satisfying darkness to it, a vibe of the shade drawn which others hide behind their alter ego, their alias, instead of embracing the heady importance and luxury of the occasional obnoxious diatribe to which wit and gravitas have no boundaries.
Alias is an electro beast, lyrically haunting, delivered with nothing less than illumination and a groove of insight to which our naked human aggression is not contained by always being fair and just; no matter how much we wish we could be.
Shy Girl’s Alias is out now and available via Because Music.
Ian D. Hall