“The universe is alive with forces of love, creativity and wonder,” says Gabi Garbutt. Damn right. On new album Radical Love, the West London singer-songwriter delivers an optimistic, nature-oriented, sexually-charged call to arms: their most contemporary-feeling, emotionally candid work to date.
Opener ‘Radical Love’ sets the tone splendidly, all pared-back ’80s synth chug and Gabi’s trademark visceral lyrical filigree: “A love like slanted light revealing all that’s broken”; “the cortisol ruining the meat of our survival”.
Compared to previous Gabi albums, these lyrical acrobatics are given more space to breathe, and, to my mind, this is all to the better. Long-term admirers may still bathe in her sparkling mosaics of simile, as on ‘Let The Tree Sing’, where “shards light up like terrified stars / fallen flowers wheeze” and “gears wind our clambering bones”.
Still, for me, the record is at its best when it is most plainspoken. ‘Snaggletooth’ – arguably their best work ever – reflects on long-gone childhood, an awkward period “sped up to child’s time”, where our young heroine was “left alone to bark and howl / In the corner of the playground”.
The guitar on that is lush, simple, clean. But boy, when they go hard, they go hard. ‘Never Danced So Much’ is a full-blooded, nostrils-flared torch song, about being “fucked into the future… Your hand charged by some dark arts / Slide your fingers in my mouth and I am yours”. Woof.
Still, the scope of this record is so much broader than nostalgic introspection and the finer points of queer ecstasy. ‘New Kind Of Weather’ tackles the looming spectre of climate change, calling out the “fucking liars”, of course, but also taking the optimistic stance that, in whatever dystopian hellscape our children inherit, “We won’t be caught up in / A storm of murder and theft / We’ll be holding each other up / And sharing out what’s left.”
Let’s hope so, eh.
My favourite bit on the album — quick shout-out to those moody, thalassic synths on ‘Deep Sea Creatures’ — is the dainty acoustic reprise of ‘Radical Love’ at the end. The chorus, “We belong together, all of us here right now / Never fearing the other / Always reaching out” is gorgeous in this arrangement, sung with heartfelt campfire candour.
Anyway, well worth a spin: a positive vision for an uncertain future, rendered beautifully with gem-bright production. Not scolding from the tower, but dancing unselfconsciously, cheeks aflush, toes curled in the soil.
Andy Hill