Review: Polly Scattergood - S/T

It’s despicable to lump female singers into one sexually defined genre, but there’s something so intentionally pathetic, so little girl lost that only a big strong man can save Brit School graduate Polly Scattergood from her brain-numbing misery that it’s jolly well the only categorization she deserves. On the absurdly MOR ‘Unforgiving Arms’, she comatosely intones, “I try my best to make him happy, but it’s not a piece of cake”, in spoken tones that are less independent glassiness, more double glazing housewife doldrums that would make Emily Pankhurst turn in her grave. Opener, ‘I Hate the Way’ is a tortured SEVEN MINUTE trudge through her nursery rhyme Evanescence emotions, wallowing in a kind of cheap Muse-on-helium lullaby that wouldn’t pass GCSE music. Her desperation to be a metropolitan Bat for Lashes is so palpable that you can practically hear the percussive ping of her gold American Apparel headband under the thin, tinny instrumentation, where cackhanded violins jab over micro electropop so dull and inconsequential that La Roux could no doubt burp a better tune. Her lyrics are a stream of self-obsessed, empty metaphor twitters that only pick up on the bizarre ‘Bunny Club’, a jarringly sleazy number inviting someone to “spit on my French knickers” in a voice that’s part pre-pubescent orphan Oliver, part Sweeney Todd’s Mrs Lovett narrating a Rampant Rabbit instruction manual for fey indie kids who give their genitalia pet names and cry during intercourse. Sadly for us listeners, the only carnal pleasure inherent in the record comes from trying to work out whether "you tell me what the sunset looks like from your brother's back yard" is some kind of euphemism…

0/5