Having passed on Conchis’ single ‘Cray Cray’ earlier in the year we did give some attention to her follow up single, ‘Trouble’ (both are on this debut album, ‘Chapters’), and found an imaginative artist capable of juxtaposing separate ideas or concepts in a way that is suggestive of the mistakes she has made in her life to date.
For example in the Lorde-like ‘Trouble’ those concepts are unhealthy relationships and fire and you don’t need to have passed your school GCSEs to know where that is going.
The album ‘Chapters’ was five years in the making on account of her struggles with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome during its creation and those struggles are chronicled (pardon the unwitting pun) in the track ‘Stories’, and again in ‘Calm your mind’, the ultimate track, one that she actually wrote before she fell ill and then found it made more sense when she did.
With psychoanalysis (of herself and others) seemingly underpinning the album and themes of loss, yearning, consumption, and desperation throughout, other tracks deal with striving for personal growth and success, but finding the opposite has happened, employing the symbolic image of a tree in ‘Trees grow higher’ (Jane Austen eat your heart out); the pain and healing process following the passing of Conchis’ mother (‘She was born’); and the choices we make in life and their impact on our personal journey (‘Cray Cray’), which I found more appealing second time around.
Other tracks deal with burnout and the fear and disappointment that her dreams would never come true (‘Just Not There’); the pitfalls of modern life and the impossible dream of finding happiness (‘People [Chapters])’. Then there is ‘Something So Shameful’ (the effects of toxic shame and in which she breaks out into a rap outro) while she subscribes to the Flat Earth Society in ‘The World Is Flat’ in which she ponders how everyone believes their opinions to be the right one and in the age of social media, where everyone has the possibility to express themselves, it can sometimes become a shouting contest.
I think you only need to tap into X right now and dial up ‘Donald Trump’ for proof of that theorem.
I selected ‘Floods’ as the sample track (it is the focus one anyway) because it is so prescient, what with the disaster in Spain and more of the same as I write, further north in the country.
In it, Conchis warns of “humanity’s destructive impact on our fragile planet.”
I have to say I disagree with the premise that ‘climate change’ has anything to do with the Spanish floods, which have been happening for centuries, or even with flooding generally, anywhere. I reckon that in most cases you’ll find that they just haven’t bothered to clean the drains out for a few years. Or decades. It’s a lost art.
But I do respect the fact that people do get concerned about the ‘future of the planet’ and give them respect for it accordingly.
She uses strange rhythms across her songs and this one is notably discordant as well right from the start as if she’s suggesting the mental impact of a natural disaster and the bizarre randomness of it. In fact the beat made me think of those that are employed on environmental ‘Save the Planet’ marches.
But weighed against that is a contrasting theme which sounds like a medieval chant, the sort of thing you might hear when the Pagans are setting fire to The Wicker Man and the song exits with the baffling, repeated, “Let it all drown”.
There is no doubt that Conchis is experimenting as much as if not more than anyone else in Finland just now and has possibly gone a step beyond her listeners who may struggle to keep up at first.
I read that some consider her to be ‘Gothic’ and others ‘cinematic’. I don’t hear either. Rather, she is creating her own sound, I can’t think of anyone else to compare her with, and that exclusivity alone marks her out for attention.
Find her on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iamconchis
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamconchis/
