Kim Gordon is seething. Throughout Play Me there’s a deep-seated rage which seems primarily directed at artificial intelligence moguls and the rich and powerful. She’s fighting a wave of machine learning on her own terms: going straight to the source and ridiculing the tech bros battling to change our ways of life.
Full of ire and desire she requests that the “Dirty tech boss” “talk dirty” to her during ‘Dirty Tech’ and, over the low-end grind of ‘Subcon’s dirty-as-hell bass, she asks “You wanna go to Mars… and then what? ” Spotify’s algorithmic playlists aren’t safe either with Gordon using the title track’s jazzy trip-hop to reel off playlist names like “Chilling After Work” and “Rich Popular Girl”, reframing their “Play Me” request into a desperate plea and highlighting that the “Feel free” sentiment of the chorus is noticeably different to actually being “free”.
She’s lancing the nerdaggedon, averting death by a thousand algorithms, yet her fury isn’t just reserved for billionaire technology tycoons and streaming sites; it’s doled out in a range of directions. The samples in ‘Busy Bee’, which refer to potentially suing a previous band called STP, might be considered a warning dig towards a certain ex. Later in that song she switches her focus, with pitched-up snippets riding in on a rough and ready bass lick, smirking about a friend who couldn’t handle the laidback life, claiming that “the pressure to relax was too much for her.”
She might be calling out AI peddlers, but Gordon is no luddite. She’s incorporating sounds and techniques that – and apologies for bringing age into it – most other septuagenarians would recoil from. Play Me’s palette is awash with trap music, with industrial dub, with distortion so thorny it’s bordering on noise. The instrumental backing on ‘Square Jaw’ alone sounds like it could have been lifted from a recent Run the Jewels record.
This is Kim Gordon’s fifth record in a little over six years, during which time she’s also managed to squeeze in working as an actress, a fashion designer, and a writer. It’s fair to say that she’s in industrious form. So, she might be forgiven then for leaning a little on the past on this one. Whirling guitars coupled with her aching vox can’t help but lend ‘Girl With A Look’ a Sonic Youth flavour and ‘No Hands’, with its creaky gates and quivering hi-hats, calls back to the masculinity skewering ‘I’m A Man’ with its “Take my hand” line.
The finale, a re-do of The Collective’s closer, kicks off with distorted slabs and chest-threatening bass and drums in the style of The Body. It’s dub from a warzone, updating ‘ByeBye’ with new terms added to the list of words that terrify Trump. Phrases such as “Bird flu”, “Peanut allergy”, and “Men who have sex with men”.
The halcyon shine of album centrepiece ‘Not Today’, however, is a much welcome backwards glance towards shoegaze days of the past. Emerging through shimmering guitar and motorik drums, it hits just right as the sun rears its golden bonce. It’s a propulsion of optimism even as Gordon adds a little extra grit to the romping distortion, a little extra desire to her sigh. And her sensual delivery of “Skippin’ all the way down” stretches her voice into areas not heard for some time. Something that AI just can’t compete with.
