Sounds like…

If The Knife and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith reinterpreted Bjork’s ‘Post’ album.

The review

‘Kids Talk Sun’ is the third album from Camil Fuchs and whilst its the first album I’ve personally listened to, I found some fascinating parallels with it to other artists. The melting pot of electronica, pop, avant-garde and more than a splash of weird reminds me of mid to late 90’s Bjork as seen through the lens of The Knife and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. Excited yet? I was!

Camila Fuchs is actually a duo and not the name of a solo artist. The duo are Camila, based in Mexico, and Daniel, from Munich. They’ve been working together since 2012 and this album feels both futuristic and planted in the past. Bjork’s ‘Post’ album played with the club scene and taking mechanical loops and turning them into percussive beats and aggressive grinding basslines. The whole album has an industrial feel and ‘Kids Talk Sun’ shares a very similar sound palette. Gears grind, basslines throb and gurgle, radio frequencies detune and the whole thing feels like a malevolent machine has come to life. A track called ‘Roses’ shows this best as the whole piece has a range of metallic guitar feedback like sounds channelled into a chugging machine of rhythm.

Over the top of this curiously beautiful death machine floats Camila’s voice. She sings very differently between each track. In ‘Sandstorm’ she free-flowing – like an ethereal siren. On opener ‘Sun’, she is robotically processed and plays with her stilted English pronunciations. All the way through, Camila’s voice is a source of lightness and intrigue as she skips around disembodied like a ghost. Often when combined, the vocal processing and the psychedelic rhythms of the synths remind me of Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s most recent album ‘The Mosaic of Transformation’. There the raj like flow seeps out of every chord whereas here, it is a much more focused trance that is being created.

All of that combines to create some really unusual but fascinating avant-garde pop. ‘Silenced By Hums’ is like you’ve fallen into a telephone wire and are being buzzed about around a switchboard. ‘Come About’ evokes the trashier side of Brit Pop from the late ’90s in the best possible way. The perfectly detuned kaleidoscope of synths that is ‘Mess’ sits equidistant between Bjork and Fever Ray as it slowly creeps through its seven-minute freak show. ‘Moon’s Mountain’ has about as close to a hook in their songs as you can get outside of the beautiful instrumental ‘Gloss Trick’ which uses hazy synths to create a dreamy downtempo piece to make you feel very… floaty.

One thing that Camila Fuchs does not have often is a hook, or a big chorus, or anything you can hang a hat on to call itself a big entry point. The duo are very distinctive in their musical delivery as they tell stories in moments that slowly evolve over the song rather than call out verse/chorus/verse. This may make it initially a bit trickier to get into what Camila Fuchs do. I recommend enjoying the album with the lights down low. I enjoy ‘Kids Talk Sun’ best at night, with just a small lamp on. The album commands dark space so well as almost every song feels ominous without ever trashing out into an emergency.

Frankly, Camila Fuchs may have made one of the most curious albums of 2020.

Recommended track: Roses

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