On her second EP for Mark Ronson’s Zelig Records, the London multi-media artist proves herself a canny, sophisticated pop stylist with a taste for tales of millennial disaffection.
In Issy Wood’s paintings, the smallest fragments of a scene can tell an entire life story. In exquisite detail, she catalogues seeming ephemera—the curvature of a snakeskin loafer, for example, or a kitten tchotchke—while leaving the background to melt away. Often painting objects seen in auction catalogues, the 28-year-old Londoner, whose visual art has been shown at Art Basel in Miami and landed her a spot in Forbes’ 30 Under 30, leaves the tragedy of a situation—the death or divorce that might have led such an object to be put up for auction—implicit.
Wood takes the same approach in her music. If It’s Any Constellation, her second EP for Mark Ronson’s Sony imprint Zelig Records and sixth in just two years, is a collection of pop songs that feel tightly cropped: tales of millennial tragedy focussing on just one point of view or one small, striking moment, placed atop arrangements that hint at the bombast of pop but expunge the bells and whistles.
The slight, sardonic products of this outlook are curious: Oddly shaped but undeniably stylish, they present Wood as someone with, at the very least, talent and a unique, appealing sensibility, if not always an impeccable sense for the kind of compositional and lyrical acumen that made her mentor Ronson a star. The five songs that comprise If It’s Any Constellation all seem to teeter on the edge of greatness before retreating. Or, as Wood herself puts it on highlight “Child’s pose”: “I’ve only got one foot in/I keep the other out/I should take that leap but I don’t.”
The best songs on If It’s Any Constellation use tropes of millennial life to convey deep, roiling disaffection. “Child’s pose,” the record’s final track, finds wry comedy in the idea of using yoga to escape trauma, summing up the often banal futility of wellness in one fell swoop: “Thought I knew what I was in for growing up/But now I’m moving to child’s pose,” she sings, elongating the word “pose” into a tumbling “oh-oh-oh” in the middle—like someone trying, and failing, to break into an expressive pop hook. “I’ll hold,” the record’s opener and something of a twin to “Child’s pose,” traverses a similar conceit, likening a breakup to being put on hold by a phone operator, and turning the experience into a squelching anti-betterment anthem: “I’ve made a list of things I need to work at/And every night I find something to add/And now I use it as a welcome mat.” Wood’s vocals are honeyed, inviting, and always multi-tracked, making her best lyrics feel like temptations from the devil on your shoulder; sometimes, she sounds like a more arch, more earthly FKA twigs.
In tone and style, Wood’s clearest contemporary is Norwegian-American satirist Okay Kaya, whose minimalist tales of anxiety and desire conjure a similar feeling of chic malcontent. But where Kaya laces her songs with surprising barbs—references to sexual dysfunction and emotional clumsiness, for example—Wood’s tend to feel smoothed over, a little too neat. As with her press—like an essay in Interview where Wood opines, almost Hannah Horvath-like, on how she “bypassed the ‘struggle’ we’re told musicians are supposed to go through” by being introduced to Ronson—Wood’s music can sometimes feel overthought, and therefore a little chilly. “Muscle,” co-produced by Ronson, gestures at mess (“Tell me I couldn’t make you happy/If I changed everything about me”) but, as it closes, settles for something closer to easily wrought neatness: “I’m worried if I move my face/That it might get stuck that way/Cause under the muscle we’re all the same.”
When If It’s Any Constellation falters, it’s often kept afloat by its primary instruments: the LinnDrum and the Juno-106, tools used to create some of pop’s most indelible moments. Wood has a gestural, fragmented production style—she is fond of foregrounding signifiers of classic pop, such as classic rock power chords, a lilting reggae beat, or the tinny clap of ’80s freestyle, all rendered with period patina by her gear—and, in a Pavlovian way, this gives her music the redolence of tightly made pop, if not quite the memorability. If this EP accomplishes anything, it’s establishing that Wood is a canny, sophisticated stylist—so much so that a lyric like “I’m getting tough/More robust,” from “Muscle,” is a tempting enough promise to keep you excited for next time.