‘Colourgrade’ by Tirzah Review: A Palette of Intimacy

[peekaboo]

The British artist’s second record leans in a more experimental direction that brings the listener in close.

The voice of 33-year-old South London singer Tirzah Mastin, who records under her given name, is always quiet and often minimally inflected—she half-speaks, hums and whispers, conveying intensity without volume. Though Ms. Mastin’s music exhibits a fair amount of range, most of her songs are in the realm of stark alt-R&B as popularized by artists like the xx and FKA Twigs. But while those acts have long since crossed over into the mainstream, her work leans small-scale and it’s filled with experimental touches. Sometimes her melodies approach pop, but mood and atmosphere are higher priorities. 

On Ms. Mastin’s acclaimed 2018 debut album “Devotion,” which landed on a number of year-end lists, she recorded with her friend, producer and multi-instrumentalist Mica Levi. The latter has made music in a wide array of settings, starting out in indie rock fronting the band Micachu and the Shapes and moving on to film scoring, including work for the 2016 biopic “Jackie” that was nominated for an Oscar. They’ve known each other since they were teenagers, having met at the Purcell School for Young Musicians in Hertfordshire, where the singer studied harp. They partner again for Ms. Mastin’s strange and rewarding second LP, “Colourgrade” (Domino), out Friday, which distills her work to its essence. 

On the opening title track, the first noise we hear is a distorted vocal that sounds like it’s coming at us through 25 feet of steel pipe, which then harmonizes with a synthesizer playing a drone. It’s a drifting piece of sound sculpture that suggests, accurately, that this will be a slightly more abstract offering relative to its predecessor. Producer Levi’s skill with texture and arrangement—they play most of the instruments on the record—is prominent throughout, and the album sometimes has the feel of a soundtrack to an experimental film. But Ms. Mastin’s voice and lyrics keep everything grounded. 

The following “Tectonic,” after opening with a held tone, glides in the direction of song. Like many of the tracks here, it’s a simple and direct statement about love and affection, which makes the chilly surfaces and general mystery of the production initially little vexing. But after repeated listens, the mix of sonics and subject matter starts to make sense: Ms. Mastin seems mystified by the wonder before her, and familiar images and concepts seem entirely new. The lyrics are clipped and uncomplicated, often lingering on fragmented scenes featuring a body. “Close touch tips where our motions / Attract the meeting of our lips / Pursued as the rhythm magnetized our hips / Techno to tectonic plates.” It’s an album about intimacy constructed to bring the listener closer. 

The barely-there arrangements are a kind of challenge, to see how little they can contain while still carrying enough information to outline the song. On “Hive Mind” she sings with a quavering R&B tone, in a duet with South London vocalist Coby Sey, whose voice brings to mind the hushed tone of James Blake. Digitally processed yelps in the background lend the track a woozy eeriness. 

This is music for staring at the ceiling on a sleepless night and it sounds best in shadowy spaces “Recipe”opens with a gorgeous blast of shimmering synths and a relentless drum machine beat. The stripped-down production mirrors the words: “I will give you / Every memory / Every dream / Every recipe / And security.” On “Beating” we hear small bits of hiss, as if the backing track is escaping from a radiator, next to a muffled keyboard that could be coming from a nearby room, and Ms. Mastin lightly clears her throat after singing the first verse, a disarming gesture that underscores just how intimate everything on the record feels. 

“Colourgrade” occasionally toys with the conventions of rock, in its own shadowy way. “Sleeping” has a clear guitar line and some gently exploded cymbal washes. The structure is bluesy and oblong, marking time as it see-saws between a couple of distorted notes. On the mid-tempo ballad “Sink In,” a twangy guitar accompanies Ms. Mastin as she sings in the warmest and sweetest end of her range about vulnerability, putting yourself back together after coming through something difficult (“Gonna let myself, gonna trust again, gonna show that I’m OK.”) The following “Hips” ends the record on a fizzy note, with a hum of static and squelching keyboards. This is unquestionably an adventurous album whose logic reveals itself with time—its disarming minimalism takes some getting used to. But if you’re curious about what’s happening in the more experimental corners of electronic music in the U.K., in a place where soundscape meets song, “Colourgrade” offers an inviting way in.