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Yr Lovely Dead Moon Don’t Look Now! Hot Concept

17.06.22

The world’s gone to shit. Temperatures are rising, wars are waging and diseases are spreading, ad infinitum. Post-punk producer and poet Rachel Margetts, a.k.a. Yr Lovely Dead Moon, takes a moment to reflect on how we’re coping with it all for her second album, Don’t Look Now!

Are you looking for an answer?” she asks on The Double, a trip-hop-leaning pop song that addresses individualism. In response: a confused wave of replies sampled from her friends, who can’t decide whether they are or aren’t.

Not that Margetts is here to offer any answers. Instead, like most of us, she chooses to observe. “So you sit right here waiting for the sun dance/ Right here waiting for the end to come,” she sings through broken lo-fi electro on Sun Dance, cooly mocking our manic way of life and inability to change it – as if we want the planet to keep getting hotter.

This droll cynicism bleeds through the album, but the Berlin-based artist has been blunter in the past. On her eponymous debut, she confronted the patriarchy with sharp lines like “touché you sadistic fucker”. Don’t Look Now! is less direct. Wry, wordy mouthfuls on Occupied describe universal pain through the analogy of a cat on a lead, and are deliberately jarring and difficult to follow. When her verses are fluid, however, the meaning is clearer and richer for it. The Wrestler’s quasi-chorus of “I just like to wrestle like a wrestler on a painting” beside synth arpeggios and washed out guitar chords neatly alludes to the tragedy of the human condition — forever grappling with its vanity, and having to deal with the resulting devastating effects.

Don’t Look Now! might not be Margetts’ most confrontational piece of work but her esoteric lyrics and dry delivery are valiant shots at trying to make sense of the world around us. But what we really need right now is clarity.