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Arca - KICK ii, KicK iii, kick iiii & kiCK iiiii

Name: Arca - KICK ii, KicK iii, kick iiii & kiCK iiiii
Item: Arca - KICK ii, KicK iii, kick iiii & kiCK iiiii
Author: Zach Tippitt

Veröffentlicht
Dec 8, 2021
Worte
Zach Tippitt
Label
XL Recordings
XL1212
Veröffentlicht
December 2021
Genres
Ambient · Experimental · Club

A bold outpouring of emotion and chaos across four LPs dedicated to Arca's many musical personalities.
Teilen
A few years back I attended an evening-long concert in LA called Night With Alejandra. Over the course of the night, Arca emerged from a coffin, crooned to post-industrial beats from inside a blood-stained glass case, led a salsa moment and even went acoustic—playing folk songs while strumming a cuatro, a small four-stringed guitar from her native Venezuela. It felt honest and raw, as if the seams holding her music together were being split apart and exposed for all to see. This was before events like Mutant;Faith, her multi-level installation performance at The Shed in New York, or her eight-CDJ live set alongside pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque for Ricardo Tisci's AW20 presentation for Burberry, way before last year's Grammy-nominated KiCK i catapulted her to a new tier of avant-pop stardom. All of these events were part of a chain reaction, crucial turning points in Alejandra Ghersi's career that pushed her past the confines of the producer-DJ label and into something less defined and much more multifaceted. It's through this lens that the KiCK series starts to unfold. Where the first installment was presented as a carefully-refined experimental pop opus, shifting gears and compressing ideas into a unified whole, the following entries—originally announced as a single album release, followed by news of two more, then a surprise fourth on release day—take a different approach. They branch off and expand beneath KiCK i like a system of deep roots, dedicated to zooming in on and enhancing Arca's multitude of musical personalities. First there's Arca the pop star, who surfaced on KiCk i. She is explored across the front side of KICK ii, which continues the flirtation with reggaeton Ghersi began with "KLK." Here she pushes things in a more aggressive direction: on "Tiro," her vocals become increasingly scattered and dramatic, as the percussion warps into a mash of cracking whips, laser shots and grinding metal. On its back half, KICK ii dips into abstract territory, sounding more like a tangled web of overactive synapses than anything immediately recognizable as pop. On "Confianza," she matches distorted, wailing vocals to an unsettling piano motif, but then seconds later the B-side's escalating discomfort melts into "Born Yesterday," where Sia belts out over an assault of twitching synths and samples. It pushes closer than ever to the mainstream while maintaining that distinct, almost queasy feel. Arca the uncompromising experimentalist and unhinged performer makes herself known too. Anyone who's seen her DJ could tell you about the confrontational aggression she hasn't yet captured on an official album. KicK iii tries, pushing the choppy, freeform and unrelenting part of Arca to the fore and pulverizing the listener over its brief, 36-minute runtime. On early track "Incendio," this energy shifts from speaker-shattering bass drops to alien Baile funk while Ghersi playfully barks commands over the top, while on "Señorita," pays tribute to the gnarled aesthetics of post-dubstep EDM (and particularly Skrillex). If this side of Arca could be boiled down into one track, it would be "Electra Rex," a defining moment in the four-album set. Combining the Freudian Oedipus Rex and Electra complexes for a "nonbinary psychosexual narrative" concept where, in her words, "the child kills both [the mother and the father] and has sex with itself." Coming on with a flurry of dagger-like percussion, its atmosphere expands and contracts fluidly and unpredictably like the mass of plastic-and-leather-clad dancers in its music video. Finally there's Arca the queer icon. This is the vulnerable side of Ghersi that speaks at length to her followers about the importance of self-love and sexual exploration, dismantling binaries and the necessity of embracing fluidity. She's present across the whole KiCK series—like on KICK ii's "Prada," where she modulates her vocals between an airy, feminine falsetto and a deep baritone—but kick iiii is truly dedicated to her. Left bruised and raw from the previous entry, the soft pads and thick walls of synth noise on tracks like the Planningtorock-featuring "Queer" feel like weighted blankets. On this album's cover art and in its track titles, including "Witch," "Hija" and "Xenomorphgirl", Ghersi openly plays with themes of personal reconstruction and femininity. And on "Alien Inside," Garbage lead singer Shirley Manson delivers a monologue on inner discovery and sanctuary. kick iiii plays like a surrealist diary of Ghersi's experiences as a queer person and transgender woman. After all that, arriving at kiCK iiiii feels like reaching the final, secret level in a video game—something only meant for those who have given their time and stuck with her this far. These songs are whittled down, a rare moment where the overwhelming density of Arca's music falls away, raw and stripped of any protective coating. This is most noticeable on tracks like "Estrogen," which reprises the lead melody from KiCK i's "Mequetrefe" as a baroque string arrangement, or "Sanctuary," where a larger-than-life voiceover from Ryuichi Sakamoto recites a poem about death and inner reconciliation (the kind of spoken word passage that Arca would have screamed into the mic during her quarantine-era Twitch stream, DIVA EXPERIMENTAL FM). There's a newfound and striking intimacy—the last gasps of the KiCK series before the explosive climax "Crown," where kiCK iiiii's softness is ripped apart by cathartic blasts of noise. It's one final, triumphant punch that leaves everything on the table. In a recently-deleted Instagram post, Arca posed nearly naked in front of her CDJs, with a caption beginning with "I have so much love to give." For an artist who has seemingly never compromised when it comes to expressing herself, these albums feel like yet another revelation, like unscrewing a computer's external plating and revealing the tangled wires and components within. The KiCK series is an exploration into each of these small pieces, the many contradictory and beautiful selves that make Arca who she is. In giving us so much, it feels like she's the least guarded and the most honest she's ever been in here career. Arca is keen to show us every side of herself, and it's hard to be anything but grateful for the experience.
Tracklist