If you’ve come here looking for easy listening, then I highly recommend turning around, shutting the door, padlocking it tightly and setting fire to the house. Love Is In The Shit by Otay:onii is the kind of record that will grab you by the eyelids and throw you repeatedly into a wall whilst relaying the lengthy history of international torture methods directly into your psyche…but, strangely, you still somehow leave feeling grateful for the experience afterwards.
Otay:onii is the project of Chinese-born artist Lane Shi. It’s a project that clearly exists far outside neat genre labels…in fact there is nothing ‘neat’ about any of this. You can hear industrial, post-rock, electronic, noise, art pop…sometimes all within the same song. Love Is In The Shit transcends any of these individual parts to become something completely unlike anything you’ve ever experienced…I just can’t work out if I’m actually enjoying it or if I’m just impressed by it.
The opener ‘Have You Ever’ leads you in gently enough, with a powerful vocal performance taking centre stage as the degraded synths play jazz chord progressions underneath. It’s her voice that is the real anchor throughout the album, and what a voice she has! Effortlessly shifting between delicate singing, spoken passages and these huge bursts of raw emotion…there’s something animalistic in the sharp, jarring methods she uses to pounce between these contrasting styles. I’m sure I’m not the first person to liken her vocal abilities to the great Julie Christmas or even Björk. The entire performance feels incredibly personal, like you’re overhearing thoughts you shouldn’t be hearing, or reading excerpts from somebody else’s diary.
‘Love From Survivors’ is one of the standout tracks, balancing the raw, unbridled vocals and harsh electronic textures with sporadic moments of genuine warmth and beauty. There’s a constant tension running through this album that seems to highlight the fine line between chaos and vulnerability, and this track, in particular, captures that perfectly. And then you get a track like ‘No Talent’, which somehow still manages to be catchy in its off-kilter, demonic vaudeville way. I never knew there was an existential dread that you can hum along to…
Then there’s ‘The Plaice’, which, for me, was the emotional high point of the whole record. It’s massive, messy and genuinely moving, shifting between a beautiful jazzy ballad and an abrasive, distressed cacophony of electronic sound manipulation. By the time closer ‘Tears Won’t Tell’ arrives, the album has fully embraced its own emotional breakdown and it leaves in a sort of cathartic haze. In fact, there’s something quite telling about the way in which I have started inadvertently talking about this record as a living being…that’s exactly what it is. A semi-sentient beast with its own range of emotions, fears and psychological issues…a monster that may well be best kept at arms-length.
This is a record that you must meet on its own terms, and there are moments where the sheer amount of ideas, and the bi-polar delivery of them can feel completely overwhelming. But honestly, that’s also what makes the album so special. Otay:onii has delivered something completely unfiltered here…something vulnerable, experimental, often chaotic, but ultimately something emotionally true and artistically pure.
Best Paired With: A thorough map of your consciousness, an egg timer, and somebody to hold your hand.
Reviewed by Bryn
otay:onii – love is in the shit is out now on pelagic records.
Leave a Reply