“Music is about feeling better, making other people feel better. It’s about solidarity; strength in numbers.” For Rebecca Lucy Taylor (aka Self Esteem) music is community. It’s the banding together to create comfort, to let others hear and be heard, to show other women that they most definitely are not alone. On her previous album, Prioritise Pleasure, Taylor was offering a beacon for those in need. “I just want to let you know there’s a point in you,” she sang with open arms. On Taylor’s new album, A Complicated Woman, she has assembled her community; the music is adorned heavily with choirs, orchestras, and collaborators.
The messages are much the same as before: at A Complicated Women’s core is an inferno-like ire at the state of the world and the inequality women face on a daily basis. (There’s also a violent undertone lurking throughout the album, with multiple references to knives cropping up across the album’s 12 tracks that speaks to the violence women face every day.) Taylor spews vitriol that is waiting to become a slogan. “Are you interested in growing? / There is other literature outside of The Catcher In The Rye”; “Let’s toast each and every fucker that made me this way”; “I’ll push through the fatigue / And make you fucking hear me.” As ever, Taylor is quotable to a tee, and her knack for a big hook is cranked up thanks to the opulent cast.
“Cheers To Me” takes a cue from Taylor Swift’s “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” (compete with musical count in), a destined anthem for powering through that sweeps you up into a singalong. Elsewhere Taylor’s penchant for a big chorus comes to the foreground at multiple turns: the fragile second half of “I Do And I Don’t Care” which lifts itself to the rafters with a Sigur Rós-like swell of voices and strings; the searing push forward of finale “The Deep Blue Okay” which goes out on a bang; and “Focus is Power”, which takes motivational messages and turns them into mantras to sing proudly.
This is the community Taylor makes. It’s both community theatre and a full West End production with a filled orchestra pit. It’s rousing and inspirational stuff at its high points, and like good theatre, it sweeps you up in it all. Considering Taylor also made her West End debut as Sally Bowles in Cabaret last year, took on a starring role in the TV series Smothered, and also turned A Complicated Woman into stage production with director Tom Scutt, it’s no surprise the album plays with the air of a talented thespian. Corners are filled and silences left for dramatic effect.
Sometimes the effect saturates, leaving certain numbers in the shadows of the grandest moments. The shiny stringed “If Not Now, It’s Soon” is a reflective ode to being both patient and determined (and includes a rallying cry from actor Julie Hesmondalgh), but it swirls itself colourless. “What Now” strips away all but the choir of voices, but (like a lot of the high res components on the album) its melody and arrangements aren’t stirring enough to be especially memorable. On “In Plain Sight” brings in Moonchild Sanelly for a brisk and thorny verse, which she follows with a stilling call of “What the fuck you want from me? I’m saving you, you’re killing me?” Before long the choir comes in and encompasses her, and while it speaks to the communal focus of the album, it also feels like it’s drowning out one of most interesting voices here.
However, some of the best moments come when Taylor sets aside the strings and choir, putting the focus on a driving beat. “Mother” is a positively grimey club track, perfectly matched to her deadpan delivery as Taylor disassembles the inequality of being a caregiver but never getting the care herself. “69” is a sex positive list of favoured positions that carries on the motto of her previous album, forming into a hedonistic 90s club banger that’s just waiting for an extended club remix. (That the video for the song was released both on Valentine’s Day and 69 days ahead of the album release date is also an amusingly welcome set of details.) “Logic, Bitch!”, on the other hand, strips away much of the fanfare and noise, and sits a ghostly and arresting piano ballad that contemplates how certain people leave a mark on us that will remain forever.
Is it fair to call out Taylor for being too much, though? It does rather seem to miss the point of Self Esteem’s music to ask for it to be more tempered. But A Complicated Woman shows that a maximalist approach can both overwhelm the point and remove any semblance of nuance. “The Curse” has Taylor reckoning with her complicated relationship with alcohol, and it excels because it doesn’t try for easy platitudes (“If I’m sober or drunk / It’s still me in the middle of the problem”). After what sounds like a distorted stylophone solo as the song comes to an end, the choir starts singing “Fuck you, fuck you.” As cathartic as it is to have an ensemble sing this (be it directed at Taylor herself, the bottle in her hand, or a particular individual), the moment feels too blunt and clunky for its own good. It’s like Taylor added it into the song just because she could instead of it adding any narrative or substantial meaning.
But saying both the loud and quiet part loud is Taylor’s raison d’être. She’s much too done with society to care to tone it down. Opening track “I Do And I Don’t Care” carries the torch of her previous album’s hit “I Do This All the Time”, beginning with a spoken word introduction to the state of her world. “I’m whingin’ in a new way,” Taylor speaks, dryly self-aware but exhausted. Like the puritanical/Handmaid’s Tale artwork depicts, Taylor is screaming into the void, a pitch black nothingness that may or may not respond. But we do hear her; the void sings back and we gather around her, because this is what community does.
