Released: 20/10/23
And ploughing a different indie synth-pop furrow to either Chvrches or The Knife, we have the equally brilliant Pip Blom. Laconic and ironic in the best way, the Dutch musician’s third album, Bobbie, stakes out an ethos that is seemingly highly suspicious of ‘love’, embracing instead the intoxicating thrills of lusty one-night stands. It’s pop about sex in the city, for adults who know, to quote Neil Young, ‘the feeling of losing once or twice’, and which evokes the Berlin seediness of Peaches – but with better tunes, and made by someone who appreciates subtext.
It’s all wonderfully arch and knowing, as evidenced by the brilliant single ‘Tiger’, and the superb ‘Kiss Me By the Candlelight’ (featuring Personal Trainer), which skewers the tired romanticism of the title, following the exhortation with the kinkily bathetic, 'Pick me up and bite my sock / Take a sip and spit a little / Treat me like a Tetris block’. Oo-er missus, etc etc. And I would be remiss not to give a special mention to the Alex Kapranos-featuring post-disco jammer ‘Is This Love?’. Reading the lyrics cold, which comprise a list of love-lorn clichés, one might surmise that the answer to this question is in the affirmative – but for the gleefully sarky delivery of Blom and Kapranos, which says something else entirely …