Yesterday in the million hours in the car, Heartworms came on and I was spellbound. A little like Interpol playing as the backing band for Drahla:
Atmospheric, ominous and noisy – it’s a solid 1:15 before Jojo Orme’s spoken-word vocals kick in and you get the lyric: Maybe it’s a different worldview/where Churchill was a woman/and Hitler was a Jew. Well then.
After that single, the debut EP A Comforting Notion came on. Every song was immediately engrossing, and it’s compelling and addictive. The EP starts with gentle and whispery vocals that kind of mask the creepiness of the lyrics, and the song gradually turns into fury, peaking with full-on screaming and droning bass.
Her singing voice is powerful but rarely used on the EP. So much of the lyrics are oblique and mysterious spoken-word, delivered with a dry, vocal-fry-heavy style that’s unexpectedly catchy.
Then today she released Jacked, her latest single, and it’s also fantastic, with richer production and an even longer intro (1:35):
Of course, she’s also in the Dan Carey orbit – he seems to be related to everything on this website these days.
Here’s the KEXP session that put her on my radar — when it was released I skipped into it to get a taste of the music, then added the latest single and release to my playlist.
I put this on this morning and couldn’t take my eyes off her, it’s a killer performance. The interview at the end is excellent, and Jojo Orme seems much more humble and introverted than her performance led me to expect. She talks about struggling with dyslexia, her love of poetry, long drives in the United States and lots more:
Lastly, this interview with The Quietus is great:
Sometimes, I’ll read a poem and have absolutely no idea what’s going on in it. But, I’ll love the feeling it evokes in me… I like to have strong visual qualities in my lyrics as a result. I’m not fully aware of his history and background, I guess Ezra Pound is a controversial poet, but I love the way he sounds. Every time I read The Cantos, the famous poem he wrote that has like five different languages in it, I go onto YouTube and listen to him recite it. There’s something so eerie about him and his voice. He also uses very strange words and wording structures.
She could be describing her own work here. I can also recommend The Code Book by Simon Singh – I read it years ago and still think about it fairly regularly.
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