Album Of The Week: FKA twigs LP1

Tahliah Barnett was a dancer before she was a singer, and that matters. Dancers learn ways to inhabit music differently, to physically respond to it, to internalize it and make it a part of their body chemistry. And Barnett was a serious dancer, one who went to school for it and who used to make her living working in the background in various pop stars' videos. ("Video Girl," a song from her LP1, is about the experience of being recognized as "the girl from the video" and denying that it's her.) As FKA twigs, Barnett sings like a dancer. That's not a knock on her pure vocal ability, which is no joke. Twigs isn't a belter, but she knows what to do with the thinness of her voice, turning her sighs into coos and her coos into wails. But when I say that she sings like a dancer, I mean she doesn't just sing over the top of her tracks. She wraps herself in them, disappearing into them. She comes up with subtle counter-rhythms, interrupts herself, hold exhalations until they become notes. Her music takes elements of dance music -- drums, synths, open space -- but it arranges them in counterintutive ways, unfurling into thickets of sound rather just thumping. Those backing tracks aren't beats. They're something else. It takes a special kind of dancer to know what to do with tracks like that, and it takes a special kind of singer to bring them to life. Twigs is both of those things.