Gush, Psychosomatic dropped this year from Fetter, the musical project of new media artist and performer Jessica Tucker. While it is a deeply conceptual album that appears to have a great deal to say about the impermanence and contingent nature of identity, it is also entirely possible to enjoy the album for its pure aestheticism. The tones are well balanced, the sequencing is simultaneously solid and indeterminate, the beat selection is both classic and very much of the moment, and Jessica's voice ushers forth through the collisions of her creation as both a whisper and a shout. All told, the fabric of her songs is like a net of conductive varicolored and iridescent fibers through which the pleasure principles of the Eurythmics are drawn out and bound up with the forceful restraint of Imogen Heap, only to be subdued and then reinvigored by the spooky, distant action of something like an Eva Geist arrangement. Gush, Psychosomatic feels like something that would be playing the lounge of a gothic dance club, hastily constructed in a half-collapsed lighthouse with a still functioning beacon, whose every illuminating rotation reveals to you spectral doppelgangers, mingling and dancing through the crowd in a cosmic replay of past frivolities and parallel courses of action that have cross-streams and overlayed with our reality. It is both an apparition of discarnate vibrations and a perfectly suitable dance record. Strange enough to get your attention, eerie enough to get your heart-racing, and reassuring enough to persuade you to move your body in all the ways it deeply wishes to be moved.
