Choke EP - Poppy: Review
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Review By Lav:
I was very surprised by just how much I loved the bright and punchy synth pop of Poppy's debut album Poppy.Computer and she has failed to let me down since then. She followed that album up quickly with a change of style on her second record, Am I A Girl?. The album achieves compositional density though interpolations of other genres throughout its runtime and if you haven't heard this record you'll probably be surprised to hear everything from ambient music to nu metal is here. But at its core the songwriting was still sharp and with performances so inexorably catchy it was hard to ignore how high Poppy was flying, on the Choke EP she continues this high standard of songwriting with a short but cherrypicked selection of wonderful tunes.
Choke was the third single for this EP, it's the title track, and the opening song on the record, so fittingly enough it is absolutely excellent. I can't tell you how much I love the huge levels of space allowed to hang in the background with heavy bass and wandering intricate percussion littering the mix. Poppy is completely robotic in her delivery but her lyricism is dramatic and surprisingly vivid. The track is dark, intimate and driving with a simple but incredibly effective hook and a truly unique and captivating progression this instantly entered the ranks as one of my favorite Poppy tracks to date.
Unfortunately Voicemail tries a lot of the same things but doesn't commit quite as hard as Choke does. The song is decent by all means but far less dramatic than its predecessor. Once again Poppy brings great lyrics and the instrumental leaves a lot of open space, as a part of this short EP the song is certainly manageable but I wish it hadn't been placed directly after a song that does what it aims to do better.
Scary Mask is the final single I haven't talked about yet and this was one I fell in love with the moment I first heard it. The track channels some of the singles from Poppy's last record and has a feature that brings a drastically different style to the mix. Fever 333 provide some blazing guitar and screamed vocals to this track that mesh really well with Poppy's haunting and almost forebodingly sweet performance. While hearing this track for the first time is a great experience it proved to be well worth returning to over and over off the back of great songwriting and performances.
Meat is a song I didn't anticipate hearing anything like that blends Poppy's sugary sweet synth pop with Slint-esque haunting spoken word passages. I absolutely love this as a concept and the horror themes that work their way into every passage of this song means this is another tune that works from top to bottom and even manages to expand on Poppy's already huge creative boundaries.
The final track here is The Hold Mountain a song that reminds me quite a lot of Poppy and Diplo's Time Is Up. It is the lyrical track here and sees Poppy analyzing humans and having a conversation with god from an outside approach where she makes some political points as well as poignant observation. The instrumental is clearly meant as more of a supporting entity and it does that pretty well with stark piano and some faint rattling percussion that keeps the song from becoming a slog.
Choke is a short but dangerously sweet collection of tracks that once again manages to prove that Poppy has conquered synth pop and is prepared to move onto whatever genre dares to step into her path next and taking on spoken word, house and screamo across just these five tracks is an indicator that she is far from done yet. While this is not her most substantial release it is a potential huge stepping stone onto more amazing things and currently lapping the field for EP of the year. 8.5/10
