It’s easy enough to identify Th Blisks’ component parts—trip-hop, torch song, post-punk, bedroom pop. It’s harder to pin down the distended, discombobulating result. Troth’s Amelia Besseny and Cooper Bowman and Low Life member Yuta Matsumura make washed-out indie dub pop songs that sound like old train cars rattling along, faded boom-bap loops and metallic post-punk guitars taking the place of dinged-up tracks and twanging overhead wires. The Australian trio made its new album, Elixa, remotely while living in Hobart, Newcastle, and Papunya, a small community outside Alice Springs. But if Elixa doesn’t quite belong to any one real place, its peculiar ambiance evokes a sprawling, desiccated urban landscape of the mind.
How So?, Th Blisks’ 2022 debut, felt similarly unclassifiable: from the mondegreen-ish band name and song titles—“A Sylph,” “Taipei Dubble”—to the album cover, which featured (I think) portraits of each band member made of pebbles, it felt like an entryway into an alternate universe where the primary building blocks of pop music are melodica and drum machine. Elixa provides a clearer picture of whatever weird liminal zone Th Blisks are transmitting from: The textures and core materials are largely the same, but it feels more spacious, less lo-fi.
Besseny’s vocals are still largely illegible, but occasionally a fragment of what she’s saying adds to Elixa’s air of laid-back benevolence: “It’s not without, it’s not within,” she sings on “Enchancity,” her reedy voice drifting over the beat; on “Knuckledust,” she sings of “a good place to start” over a track that sounds like “Steal My Sunshine” after a collective barbiturate overdose. The positivity within Besseny’s lyrics—“Looking for a faith/Without all the fiction,” she sings on “Do You Bless It?”—speaks to a primary appeal of Elixa: This sideways and detuned music nonetheless still conveys brightness. That’s not all it contains, though: The cavernous dirge “No Know” and the ghostly processional “Umbrah” temper Th Blisks’ warmth with a sinister, creeping edge.
If you were to test a sample of Elixa’s DNA, you might trace its genealogy back to sensuous, strange ’90s artists like the Japanese trip-hop singer Poison Girl Friend or fogged-out Melbourne band Hydroplane. Th Blisks also feel like contemporaries of fellow Australians a.s.o. and YL Hooi, who releases music via Bowman’s Altered States label. Besseny’s vocals sometimes recall Grimes circa Geidi Primes. That swath of references is mostly to say that Elixa belongs to a broad canon of music that seems to exist a millimeter or two outside the space and time in which it was actually released: the soundtrack of a city that doesn’t exist and probably never will.