FKA twigs: EP2

London-based FKA twigs is a musician whose work runs in direct contrast to her interview persona. In a recent Rising feature she comes across as bubbly, enthusiastic, even a little goofy. This release, a second four-track EP following her 2012 debut, triggers a dual feeling of being buried in her suffering and a sense of relief that her music provides an outlet for it all. "I guess I'm stuck with me," she sighs on "Water Me". Comparisons to trip-hop have come quickly in twigs' short career, most of them justified. It's closest to the moment where Tricky and Martina Topley-Bird gelled to wonderfully gloomy effect on 1995's Maxinquaye, finding a perfect meeting point for weed-fuelled paranoia and all-consuming love. Yeezus collaborator Arca is on board as producer, neatly building a bridge toward his own Tricky worship on tracks like "2 Blunted" from his UNO album Stretch 2. The level of detail is immense, but never too fussy. Still, the sense of space from EP1 is largely gone-- even in its sparsest moments this is a work that bears down on you, barely allowing any room to breathe.

Making disparate elements work together was a key tenet of trip-hop, where a spacey quality was given room to flow amid beats that were more commonly associated with tightly wound hip-hop tracks. It's something twigs and Arca understand implicitly, unlike the small legion of pallid genre clones that followed the Bristol triumvirate of Massive Attack, Portishead, and Tricky. So on "How's That" we get down-tuned slabs of noise and a sound that resembles a manic ping-pong ball layered under twigs' emoting. "Water Me" is built around a playful vocal sample that recalls Laurie Anderson's "O Superman". At times the most striking element is the oppressive bass that swells up, bearing such weight it resembles someone dragging a gigantic rock through the desert. But twigs is the star here, her voice rising and falling in unexpected places, full of unique color, sometimes pulling you in close even if the place she's in doesn’t feel like somewhere you necessarily want to be.

Something striking about twigs' delivery is her desire to switch between the real and the unreal, allowing her to open up a distance with her audience whenever she chooses. On "Water Me" she's coated in a thin layer of FX, adding another alien layer to a music that already sounds positively extra-terrestrial. Then she’s slowly sliding down the wall again in "Ultraviolet", beginning the song with a clutch of highly pitched lines perforated by an icy quiver. But there's always a sense of reticence, of not letting you get too near her malaise-- a feeling emphasized when "Ultraviolet" slows down to total sludge at the midway point, becoming less trip-hop and more trudge-pop. When the song bursts into something resembling a sunny R&B chorus it starts to wilt under the weight of too many good ideas stirred into the same pot. But she just about gets away with it, primarily because the juxtaposition never feels forced.

It's no surprise to discover that twigs is something of a loner, as outlined in her Rising interview. Sometimes it's hard to imagine how the collaboration with Arca even works, mainly because her music is so solitary. Twigs is only in her mid 20s, but EP2 is the sound of someone who has lived a lifetime in their own head, and is now letting it spill out publicly in its oddly open-yet-guarded way. There's a sense of watching her grow in public, too. The progress since her first EP is strong-- if "Breathe" from that release resembled Topley-Bird's work with Tricky a little too closely, here she's starting to shed those tendencies, settling further into her own voice, finding her own way around rhythms. Mostly there's a sense of poise amid the hurt and the distrust and the feelings of infatuation. Twigs' music taps into that moment of serenity that settles in when everything comes crashing down around you, where you accept your fate and just go with it to see where it might lead.