Album of the Week: Arlo Parks – 'Ambiguous Desire'
Five years after her Mercury-winning debut, the West London poet returns with Ambiguous Desire – a record that lives in the "happysad" space between the dancefloor and the walk home.
Album #3 time for the west Londoner whose poetry-channelling, Mercury-winning debut Collapsed in Sunbeams came out five hectic years ago, and it’s all back to Arlo’s. “We’re doing dishes, the party’s starting to thin,” she sings in a dazed coo on the opening track, “Aleda’s cousin’s out the back being sick / The walls are scratched up / It smells of chips and gin / Crash and Ames are back at it / She kissed his cheek before she split”.
Not so much the party, then, but the afters. Hence the title – ‘Blue Disco’ – of a curtain-raising song which is bruised, gauzy dreampop ripped straight from the soundtrack of a Sofia Coppola elegy to late nights and lost boys/girls. Because Ambiguous Desire is the record on which the Covid-era, bedroom-pop #sadgirl gets her groove on… ish.
As much was telegraphed by first single ‘Get Go’: skippy, pleasingly decaffeinated drum’n’bass that spans the night, from wide-eyes on a strobing dancefloor to wee-hour cab rides across London/New York/LA, Local FM on low. The come-up and the comedown in one blissed-out banger.
Follow-up ‘Heaven’ went in similarly hard-and-soft, the beats nagging, the sentiments wistful (“I wish I had the language, to tell you the way this feels,” Parks sings in her cochlear-close voice, “let’s get involved, until the dawn breaks”). Likewise ‘2SIDED’, the pain and longing of unrequited love layered over Eighties synthpop jolted by junglist rhythms.
Template firmly established by those three tasters, last week the 25-year-old released ‘Beams’. It’s what’s known in the music business as the “focus track”: the song put out right before the album and/or the song that everyone involved thinks is the strongest and best exemplar of the record as a whole. And, mostly, it is. Over trip-hop beats and Chris Martin-style, lighters-aloft piano, ‘Beams’ paints another picture of a sleazy-cool motive (“We were sobering up / On a stranger’s stairs / Looking over shots / Of Harley Weir”), but with a shadow of emotional rejection and suicidal thoughts that’s more than just a bad trip.
It’s all exquisitely happysad, the phrasing as gracefully well-turned as we’d expect from a published poet, an album with one foot in the club and the other back in the bedroom, its protagonists repeatedly circling each other in the haze of either dancefloor smoke or of that ambiguous desire. Eventually, though, the listener’s head and hips yearn for a thrust of the “queer hedonism” in which Parks seemingly immersed herself at New York’s Paradise Garage. By the time we reach the penultimate ‘What If I Say It?’, we’re back in the enervating realms of the dreaded “dinner party soul” that came to characterise the fag-end of trip-hop.
On the final ‘Floette’, at least, the washes of atmospheric synths build to a frenzy of percussion and free-jazz drums. As Arlo Parks says in the album’s closing words, in the end, at last, at least, “we’re blossoming”.
