Like an electroclash party inside a kids TV studio, Gelli Haha’s debut album Switcheroo is characterised by playfulness with a hedonistic, sometimes sinister bent. Gelli Haha is the pseudonym of LA-based artist Angel Abaya, who released a decent indie rock album, The Bubble, under her own name in 2023. She’s since eschewed this more conventional aesthetic to establish ‘the Gelliverse’ – a high-concept theatrical world of play from which the character of Gelli Haha emerged, an amalgamation of Pee Wee Herman, Marina Diamandis’ Electra Heart and a 00s electroclash party girl.
Switcheroo begins with a soaring, retro-futurist synth, as though Gelli is descending to earth from her disco ball home planet. The track’s title is ‘Funny Music’, but there’s a melancholy and rigour to the songwriting, even as it’s punctuated by daft sound effects and cut off by a huge ‘BONK’ at the end. Gelli speaks over the chaos as though in existential voiceover (“It’s all a hoax / it’s just a joke”) establishing a tension between pose and play that continues through the album as she tries on different personas. For ‘Johnny’ she’s a torch singer leaning louchely against a Casio keyboard; in ‘Spit’, she’s an aerobics instructor-cum-dominatrix commanding her submissives to “suck, smooch, snap, surrender” alongside a relentless beat; for ‘Bounce House’ she’s led by freewheeling childlike exploration, mixed with tongue-in-cheek suggestion (“Tell me, are you ready to tumble?”). Each song is stuffed full of electronic whizzes and kaleidoscopic synths, fizzy like static electricity.
In addition to these fantastical personas, Gelli also embodies a more down-to-earth narrator for ‘Piss Artist’, an all-out slice of debauchery in the middle of the record. Her girlish giggles transformed into guttural laughter, Gelli lays on the valley girl affectations as she recalls a wild night of partying (“Once she took her shirt off it was like, oh everyone can take their shirt off”), her droll spoken word bolstered by chunky electroclash beats. Celestial voices harmonise around her, suggesting that even the records earthier pleasures have transcendent properties. Party girls are of course currently in vogue or recently passé, depending on who one speaks to – but ‘Piss Artist’ is less Charli, more Princess Superstar and Kesha.
The after-party continues on the chaotic and funny ‘Tiramisu’, where Gelli’s voice turns even lazier, a half-arsed featured vocalist on a piano house track. “Whaaaat the heeeeell issss goooooing ooooon?” she repeats – well exactly! Seemingly tired of our earthly concerns, she ascends back to the skies during the excellently-titled closing song ‘Pluto is not a planet it’s a restaurant’, her long weaving vocal lines positioning her as Caroline Polachek with a better sense of humour. Switcheroo is tonnes of fun in its own right, but is also ripe with potential for further transmissions from the the Gelliverse.
