Alright well if no else else is going to talk about this album for WKNC, I guess I will. FKA Twigs is a art pop and alternative R&B artist from England who has made some serious waves in the Indie scene as of late. Her persona is that of a mercurial and unpredictable songwriter known for mixing in unconventional sounds and ideas into mainstream adjacent sounds.
I put off listening to her new mixtape “Caprisongs” for almost a month, partially due to personal fatigue, but also because I’ve had trouble getting into FKA Twigs for some time. This new album was the latchkey for me. The mixes feel just a little cleaner, the experimental elements are a little more seamlessly integrated into the rest of the sound, and the songwriting is just the tiniest touch more personal. While the tape is hardly a leap forward for the singer in any one regard, she has refined her established sound just enough that the music finally popped for me.
The album, on a granular level, is a whiplash inducing cross between depressive and wistful ballads and high energy sexual bangers. It’s a tightrope that has no business working as well as it does, but through the very specific lens of FKA Twigs it makes a lot of sense. One of her lyrics on this album is literally “beautiful and sad” which feels about as on the nose as Post Malone releasing a song called “Rich and Sad.”
The title is something of a self-effacing joke. The meme from a few months ago of “Astrology girls will really hit your car in a parking lot and say ‘Sorry, I’m a Capri sun,'” is inverted here to rib FKA Twigs’ “feminine mystique” inflected persona. The joke is mostly advanced in interludes, but it strangely becomes a thematic element of the album. The album sees FKA Twigs stop romanticizing and spiritualizing her life so aggressively, and wake up to the realization that the men in her life aren’t good enough for her to waste her time on. And yet, she never gives the wistful Astrology girl energy, she, in her own words “Is still mysterious.”
A duet with the Weekend was the album’s single for fairly obvious reasons. However, the highlight of the album for me is actually the track with Shygirl, “papi bones,” which if you can’t tell from the name, is a pretty brazen sex jam. The electronics are nowhere near as off the wall as something you’d find on a solo Shygirl record, but still just heavy enough to make the song pack a punch. To give you an idea of the tone for the song, the lyrics are entirely clean and PG, and yet the song was still flagged as explicit by my streaming service. FKA’s soprano moans may be entirely above board, but they evoke a dirtier image than any Cupquakke song ever could.
If you were already into FKA Twigs, this album might not be a whole lot to write home about. But if, like me, you weren’t already aboard the hype train for this artist, give “Caprisongs” a chance, it might finally make this artist click for you too.
