“Emerging from behind the shadow of his “singer/songwriter” alias, Irma Vep, Stevens perhaps reveals more of himself as a human being than ever before. If Irma Vep’s overpowering compulsion was for self-analysis bordering on self-flagellation (as hilarious and thrilling as that often was), under his own name his stories seem more well-rounded, more honest. It’s telling on album closer ‘Some Things Are Best Left Undone’, a cover of his own song as Irma Vep. The same song, a beautiful ballad, is rendered here simply and boldly with piano and voice in contrast to the scratchy guitar version recorded 10 years ago. It might be an intertextual joke given the song title but we can afford Stevens his own private mirth given the killer last line of the song and album: “the horse you rode in on just died and I swear I saw a tear in his eye / You thought that he might try say goodbye but he didn’t and you wonder why.” Whereas the Stevens of 2013 might have covered up the core of his message with self-deprecating tape hiss or guitar brutality, here Stevens is telling his story, straight. His story, it turns out, is not one solely populated by ghouls, distortion and compulsion but one that we can all, horror of horrors, relate to. Just people doing people things, fucking up, stressing and relieving, living crooked or living straight.”
Pete Um is a tape-poet from Cambridge, UK, with sardonic humour, an unreliable MD player and a bunch of weird electronic miniatures. Attempts to define his personality provoke his peers to phrases like…
“…Um is an electro-dadaist pop star peddling audio anxiety and monomania from the digital kitchen sink
…Um is the glint in Delia Derbyshire’s eye as she puts Kurt Schwitters and Julian Cope to the razor blade
…Absolute belter of oddball proportions…”
“To whom are your lyrics addressed to?” Felix Kubin once asked Um:
“A lot of my music is made just for its own sake, and I’m kind of talking to myself, but sometimes I’m bitching about a specific other person or how this world of ahistorical squares has done me wrong.”
Um’s 2019 LP ‘As You Were’ was one of the best of 2019. Low Company wrote: “Where so much contemporary stuff in this vein sounds hopelessly mannered and contrived and untouched by actual real-world experience of being on the outside of ANYTHING, ‘As You Were’ sounds fully free and unforced, hopelessly alienated from the thing we call society and GLAD of it, and even at its most demented and disorderly your man sounds like he’s wrenching everything he possibly can out of his primitive keyboard-and-mic set-up cos it’s all he’s bloody well got, not cos he’s self-consciously imposing limitations on himself.”
