What lies between water and the shore?
Slipping inside the crevice of a dream, taking her title from a Korean term which encompasses everything from idle fantasies to intrepid night terrors, on her sophomore album Lucy Liyou swaps molten piano instrumentals and text-to-speech snippets for a staccato of saliva sounds and a more fulsome embrace of pansori, a genre of musical theatre performed by a singer and a drummer which emphasises the trials and tribulations of character within a national ethos of repressed sorrow or collective grief.
Presaging the romance of ‘Fold The Horse’ and the woozy drama of ‘April In Paris’ – an interpretation of the Vernon Duke jazz standard which figures the cruellest month as one rife with possibilities while honing in on a cemetery in Philadelphia where the narrator reflects on the reiterating horror of sexual assault – on the title track the artist recalls a dream of drowning and being pulled to the shore by someone who they first thought was their mother, but turned out to be a close friend.
Climaxing with a tongue-twister of gushing tenacity and operatic force, Liyou asks ‘Why can’t you depend on me? When I need someone to need me?’ blending the twin torments of self-abnegation and codependency with the languid irresoluteness of limpid desire and the conquering bounty of trust.
