Sometimes, it’s really hard to avoid clichés while writing. I mean, that’s why clichés exist, right? They’re easy. And with an artist as consistently impressive as FKA twigs, it would be far too easy to say something like “‘MAGDALENE’ is another classic for FKA twigs” or “FKA twigs has done it again.”
What will make avoiding those clichés hard is that they are, without a doubt, absolutely correct. So instead of attempting to eschew them, I’ll just explain them.
“MAGDALENE” is the second full-length album from the mysterious singer-songwriter FKA twigs, and the first she’s released in nearly four years, with her last project being the incredibly emotional EP “M3LLI55X” in 2015.
Despite it being a hopelessly vague word, “emotional” is one of the few words that can aptly sum up FKA twigs’ style. Her music somehow sounds like so many contradicting things at the same time; twigs manages to sound like she’s deeply insecure and profoundly self-assured; morose and triumphant; supplicative and sinful.
Her music has always contained multitudes, wrapping up the spectrum of human emotion into dizzying alternative R&B songs that truly sound like nothing anyone else is doing right now, and perhaps that’s never been more true than it is here on “MAGDALENE.”
On mid-album cut “fallen alien,” twigs uses the term to describe herself. And while she seems to use the term to describe her outsider status in a relationship that’s turned sour, the term perfectly fits twigs’ own status in modern R&B and pop music. Her music decidedly sounds not of this world, and this track serves as one of the most perfect examples of that.
FKA twigs sings powerfully over instrumentation that can only be described as tense, building up with the same intensity as the way your throat starts to close as a panic attack starts to set in.
“I’m a fallen alien,/ I never thought that you would be the one to tie me down,/ But you did. In this age of Satan,/ I’m searching for a light to take me home and guide me out,” she sings on the chorus, with something that sounds either like raw anger or aggressive self-confidence, before the instrumentation explodes with passion on the verse.
But despite — or perhaps in conjunction with — the raw displays of aggression, twigs also focuses in on a raw sort of tenderness, unafraid to show her true emotions. twigs repeatedly compares herself to Mary Magdalene, a biblical figure mentioned in the Christian gospels as a former prostitute who became one of the first and most ardent followers of Christ.
twigs’ choice of Mary Magdalene as a source of inspiration is a fascinating one, as Magdalene perhaps encapsulates better than any other figure the “Madonna-whore complex,” an idea in the psychoanalytic interpretation of literature that suggests that our deeply misogynistic literary canon is only capable of displaying women as perfectly good or totally flawed: female characters in literature are unfortunately fated to being either the virginal Mary or Eve who ate the apple, with Magdalene somehow being one of the few female figures in the Bible that is somehow both, a good person who was once literally a prostitute.
Twigs attempts to combat this dualistic and deeply harmful view of women throughout the record, but does so perhaps no more obviously than on “mary magdalene,” on which twigs warbles: “A woman’s work,/ a woman’s prerogative,/ a woman’s time to embrace,/ she must put herself first.”
She powerfully rejects the idea that there is anything that a woman is supposed to do, by comparing herself to a woman who was, as I said before, both. She goes on on the chorus: “I’m fever for the fire,/ True as Mary Magdalene./ Creature of desire,/ Come just a little bit closer to me.” twigs owns her sexuality, but maintains that she can be true, just as Mary Magdalene was.
The record’s religious themes carry over to the very ways the songs are structured; the record opens with the powerful “thousand eyes,” which hears twigs using a repetitive, cyclical structure that calls to mind the meditative nature of Gregorian chants. It primes the listener for an experience that is somehow both inspired by Christianity and seems to reject it.
While I write this, I’m sitting in a Starbucks, with FKA twigs playing in my headphones. Blaring over the speakers, and bleeding through my headphones, is Dave Brubeck’s classic jazz composition, “Blue Rondo à la Turk,” and it strikes me that twigs and Brubeck are somehow the exact opposite of each other. Brubeck’s famed experimentation with complex time signatures isn’t obvious upon first listen, requiring the listener to strip back layers of what sounds like a simple, catchy tune to realize how profoundly complicated it all is.
twigs, though, anchors all of her songs, with these big ideas and explosive instrumentation, to deceptively simple pop structures. Below the philosophizing and swirling production are tunes that will infect the listener’s mind, delivering the payload of the emotional gut-punch that is the lyrics on some of these tracks.
There is so much more to dissect in these songs, but not much room left for me to do it in. This is the kind of record that I will be thinking about for quite a long time, and it easily shoots up my list of my favorite albums of the year.
I hate to say it, because I hate clichés, but FKA twigs has absolutely done it again.
