Farao entered the music scene with a promising debut that drew influences from a wide range of artists, eras and sounds. However, it could be said that in this colourful equation her own personality was lost. The same rings true of Pure-O, her latest album, where perhaps Farao sinks too deep into her neo-80s landscape of dreamy synths and glitchy samples.
Heavy drumbeats cut through the hazy synth to spell out a distinct desire in tracks like Lula Loves You: a desire to be someone and somewhere Farao isn’t; a desire to be the cutting edge of an eclectic neo-new-wave dance-floor. No matter how hard Farao works on the immaculate production, or how much sweat goes into crafting simplistic and memorable melodies, the experience of Farao herself is fleeting at best. In her place are echoes of artists warped together in order to defy classification. Is this courageous defiance or is it going with the flow? Sadly, it rings of an artist lost in her own struggle for identity.
Pure-O operates on two levels for the listener; as a relatable dissociation into the dream pop side, and as an unsuccessful dive into the over-personified new romantics. Unfortunately, it is the feeble new romantic side that dominates on this LP where the attempts to take on other artists’ sounds forces Farao to lose any uniqueness of her own. Whilst dreamy, her well written songs are disguised under a myriad of moans where the reverb plunges the mix into the mud on an otherwise impeccably produced album.
[Tim Dawson – @theblutit]
[Image credit – Maxime Imbert]
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