FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
SOPHIE - OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES
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IT is especially tragic…
PHOTO CREDIT: Charlotte Wales
that the world lost the pioneering and remarkably influential SOPHIE at the age of just thirty-four on 30th January, 2021. Her only studio album, OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES, was released in 2018. I have been meaning to include the album in Vinyl Corner for months. It has been hard to find it on vinyl. Rough Trade describe the album like this:
“Sophie’s debut album Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides is released via Transgressive Records. The album is the next step in Sophie’s incredible and unorthodox career, following the Product EP and is a bold artistic statement that establishes Sophie as a pioneer of a new pop sound. It is sprawling and beautiful, while still keeping the disorienting, latex-pop feel of her fascinating production technique. The worlds of commercial pop and electronic music have never converged in quite the way they have with Sophie. Oil Of Every Pearl's Un-Insides, Sophie's first proper album, presents her artistic vision in a purer form than anything she's done before. It is at times unapologetically poppy, beginning with the opening power ballad, It's Okay To Cry. But it's also utterly, defiantly weird, flouting conventions of rhythm, composition and, perhaps most of all, taste”.
There were copies available through Rough Trade until very recently. One can find a copy for not too much at Discogs. It is a little pricey, though I would recommend people spend some money on a future classic. Alternately, keep your eyes peeled in your local record store and sites like Rough Trade.
It is hard to define or categorise OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES. Such is its eclectic nature, one listens to it over and over and gets new things. An album that will inspire artists for many years to come, one wonders where SOPHIE could have headed and what she could have achieved. Rather than mourn or become too morose, it is worth celebrating an album that stunned critics in 2019. She released the compilation album, Product, in 2015 – so people knew kind of what to expect. I feel OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES is one of the greatest debut albums we saw in the 2010s. It is no surprise that there is an abundance of remarkably positive and effusive reviews. I want to bring in a couple. This is what AllMusic had to say about OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES:
“Considering SOPHIE's influence on electronic and pop music in the 2010s, it's hard to believe that Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides is only the producer's debut album. The music collected on Product emphasized whimsical artificiality, using it as candy-coated armor that expressed SOPHIE's queerness and originality in equally affected and affecting ways. On the producer's first proper album, SOPHIE juxtaposes shiny surfaces and what lies beneath them.
Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides begins with the manifesto "It's Okay to Cry," a single that, upon its October 2017 release, felt and sounded drastically different than the producer's previous music. Instead of the helium-pitched vocals, it features SOPHIE's own voice for the first time while softly unfolding synths turn small but profound realizations into something epic. While nothing else on the album is quite so vulnerable, or close to conventional pop, "It's Okay to Cry" is the perfect prologue to Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides. Working with pop stars ranging from Charli XCX to Madonna hasn't blunted SOPHIE's music in the slightest -- in fact, it's even bolder, particularly on the album's first half. On "Is It Cold in the Water?" and "Infatuation," the producer embellishes on "It's Okay to Cry"'s widescreen intimacy, transforming deep synth grooves and diva vocals into mutant pop ballads that are all the more gorgeous for their strangeness. SOPHIE complements these reflective moments with the hard-edged mischief of "Faceshopping," which uses ever-changing lyrics and torquing synths to express how an authentic identity can be created through aesthetic choices, and the raunchy "Ponyboy," which sets the erotic possibilities of those identities to a heaving beat.
Despite these radical shifts, SOPHIE never sounds indecisive. Where Product felt like a collection of alien pop hits, Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides abounds with interludes, passages, and major statements that allow the producer to dig deeper on the album's second half. The dissolution telegraphed by "Not Okay"'s malfunctioning rhythms and vocals morphs into the liminal space of "Pretending," a six-minute dronescape that suggests an idea -- or identity -- coming into being with a mood that's equally blissful and anxious. The dualities grow even more complex on "Whole New World/Pretend World," a collage of sugary pop, sirens, self-destructing electronics, and clouds of wordless vocals that falls somewhere between a beginning and a warning. Fortunately, SOPHIE takes a moment to celebrate the joys of imagination and reinvention on "Immaterial," a shout-out to misfit boys and girls that sounds like a party with Prince, Basement Jaxx, and Hatsune Miku at the top of the guest list. While SOPHIE's music has never been simple, Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides' complexities and reinventions make it a remarkable debut album that reveals more with each listen”.
I think the first time I heard OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES in full was a few months after it was released. I did not know much about Glasgow-born SOPHIE. I was moved by OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES and compelled myself to check out other stuff she had done. I can recommend buying OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES on vinyl.
Just before closing things off, I want to quote from a particularly deep review of OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES. I might write more about the album, as it is Pride Month and SOPHIE identified as a trans woman. I will end with a review from Tiny Mix Tapes. Go and read the entire review if you can (I have selected a few parts that I feel are important):
“Pop music is built on a history of love songs and becomings, of a desire to find oneself in another. Madonna wrote “Material Girl,” an anti-love song that is inevitably also a love song to herself, singing “Boys may come and boys may go/ And that’s all right you see/ Experience has made me rich/ And now they’re after me,” a material world building a self through fleeting impressions of and with others. SOPHIE, also perhaps inevitably, writes “Immaterial,” the truest Pop Song on a Great Pop Album, a euphoric number in the classic PC Music hyperpop register that offers, “Without my jeans or my bra/ Without my legs or my hands/ With no name and with no type of story/ Where do I live?/ Tell me where do I exist?” Even when she’s not writing bangers like this song, the pop-drive permeates, this reaching toward another person or thing through codified and socially-coded but endlessly reworked musical forms, through chords and melodies that evoke heartfelt emotional responses through well-worn but ever-fresh routes.
In this music, there is nothing without a signifier; a body is immaterial, a body is raw material for experience, for boys. But here, there is another, and it sings, “You could be me and I could be you,” it sings, “anything, anyhow, any one, any place, any time,” “and no matter where I go, you’ll always be here in my heart.” There are jubilant horns. Auto-tuned vocals leap upward far past the range of unmodified human voice. Is there an unmodified human voice, a voice free of the pressure of vocal training and social training? There is real joy in this fucked-up non-body, these beings of sound and play and fear.
The album ends in a warzone with “Whole New World:Pretend World,” a 10-minute, blasted-out shell of largely percussion-free sonic aggression and down-mixed gravelly vocal intonations interspersed with chirpy exclamations of the title. It’s endlessly repetitive, but nothing ever repeats without being reworked or retuned, tiny cycles of new worlds opening and disappearing in sonic violence. It dissolves into hissing and buzzing. It’s a pretend world, a pop world, a Real World. Fractured, inconsistent, broken, torn, OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES aims toward the stylistic grandness of High Pop, and in that inconsistence, it achieves it.
In its flows and breakings, it echoes and repeats a fractured self, locating this fracture as something aimed toward futurity, toward a new image of pop music, toward a new mode of being and becoming, toward a new way of moving limbs on a dancefloor with others. It’s incredible”.
Nearly six months since the world lost the visionary SOPHIE, I feel there is a new appreciation for her sole solo album, OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES. It is a masterful and hugely accomplished album that everyone needs to own on vinyl – regardless of their musical tastes. Even though its creator is no longer with us, OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES is…
A stunning work that will live forever.