Attitude aside, the Perth blues-rocker is a world away from Prince. She’s best known as for the ballsy blues rock with a succession of projects that left critics both worshipping her and struggling for acts to use as comparison. New offering Design Desire, however, belies comparison.
Her voice is little like an aural kaleidoscope, a shifting procession of keening, pleading, ballsy rock that is at once mesmerizing and terrifying. It’s real and visceral – a long spectral reverb wail sends shivers down your spine then breaks into a scintillating mess of grunts, pants and yelp before sweeping back to grag you by the spine and balls again. This is the first record where her voice and impressive axework are finally on even keel. Her guitar roars and simpers, then drops away for an a cappella break draws you in before coming back to tear you apart with jagged minor chords and slinky delta-blues. That, combined with a touch of piano balladry looms behind her lyricism for a truly dark and visceral record.
Which is not to say that it’s not fun. The raw blues-rock and brazen sexuality of previous albums have been refined into a more inscrutable stage persona, dark and sexy, playfully satanic. Like her unlikely hero Prince, she exorcises demons through carefully wrought lyrical personas, taking on different voices and points of view to explore different facets of desire.
“The record is about love and lust, the mysteries and the miseries that come with those things. All those things are so multi-faceted, it’s not like it’s never been written most writers write about these things, so many different reaction and experiences. Every song is about a different element of desire and love.”
Design Desire is extraordinary record, one that captures a musical opus that is seductive and slightly dangerous sounding. It has sleek deadly beauty of a hungry lioness that nuzzles you affectionately while wondering what you taste like. According to May, this is result of a three year period of creativity and experimentation that that saw her release four records in three years.
“I never felt particularly happy with my records. I made my first record with two microphones and a bottle of gin,” she reveals. “We got drunk and did it, it sounded terrible – like AM radio – but there was a vibe there that I really liked.”
She then released an awkward rock ‘n’ roll record, followed by a retreat into blues with Hoodoo You Do, a record influenced equally by Screaming Jay Hawkins, and a little bit of Tom Waits’ Bone Machine. “I wanted to make a fucked up blues record” May explains.
After that there was another period of rock ‘n’ roll with the sultry Hawaiian Disease EP, before she finally took a break to give herself time to think. “There was a dissatisfaction that I wanted to exorcise, which led to these massive periods of writing and recording,” she states.
The result of that break is Design Desire, a perfect synthesis of her rock and fucked up blues. It’s hard to believe that she ever had a learning curve, went through the safe faltering half-steps and misfires that all artists go through, so fully formed is her persona, so assured is the great a wail on show here. I asked her if she’s happy now, and can rest with this record.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be satisfied… dissatisfaction is an important part of the work. It’s not that I’m not happy with it, but it’s far from perfect. I think if you think you’ve made as perfect thing, you have to wonder if that satisfaction is genuine. But yeah, I think it’s pretty good.”
