It's a bit of a non-sequitur, but when I hear about Alyssa Midcalf's project Primer, the 2004 film of the same name immediately comes to mind. Yes, the one that you need a literal diagram to understand. There really isn't any reason for this; it's just a quirk of association within my own head. That said, her second album Incubator does produce in me a similar blossoming mixture of contraposed thoughts and emotions as the first time I saw the aforementioned film. A bushel of slippery impressions that range from delight to disorientation, where I am never entirely sure I'm following the plot, or even if the person who made the thing I am enjoying is from the same terrestrial plane as myself. This is in the face of the fact that the actual styles and modes of expression on the album are entirely familiar. Incubator is a consummately refined and patently enjoyable pop album. Either of the blokes in the Pet Shop Boys would swell with pride to put their name to these hooks and sailing, synth-battened grooves. However, that honor goes to Aylssa herself, who, along with her friend Noah Prebish from Psymon Spine, was able to give a pulse to plastic beats and a body temperature aura and salt and sweat feel to cooly calculated consortiums of intricate pop machina. So why do I feel like I'm time traveling every time I listen to this record, or like I'm coming out the other side of it a different person? A stranger in a familiar land. I have to attribute it to the lyrics. These conventional pop songs convert normal anxieties about the future and one's relationships into twisted fables about women with monsters in their stomachs or pointed treatises on the impossible nature of ordinary dreams. Many of these songs have been with Aylssa since she was a teen, so the continuum upending aspects of them might seem less incredulous when you think about the fact that many of them serve as a periscope backward through time- one where you can see her younger self preserved in a heart-shaped opal at the end of a long burrow which opens through her bosom in the present day. For Aylssa, this seems like a means to preserve the sense of hope, wonder, and curious terror that an "inner child" can represent in their archetypal form. Growing up around this sense of a former self, rather than forcing them to grow up with you, can be a means of preserving one's identity through all the changes that life forces on a person. Sometimes there is just a part of your that needs to stay hidden, or at least a part of you that knows how to remain hidden in plain sight.
