Marika Hackman’s new single – “all night,” released online today to advance her third LP, Any Human Friend, out via Sub Pop and AMF Aug. 9 – is an interesting collision of the bombastic and the nuanced, and somehow manages to straddle both idioms while describing, sometimes in lovingly horny detail, the eros of lesbian sex.
The song, for all the breathless attention to X-rated specifics, is really a relaxing ride, complete with cooed backing harmonies, lazy Sunday slack-infused guitar, and buttery-smooth Jon Brion-style production. The Brion note is appropriate, as “all night” is surprisingly close to what I imagine would happen if Rid of Me-era PJ Harvey, clearly a Hackman influence, had written songs for the Brion-scored Magnolia. (Sorry, Aimee Mann.)
There is an alarming forwardness to the lyrics, for sure – according to press material, the London-based Hackman aimed to write an explicit song about two women fucking, and to do it as far as possible from a male-fetishized perspective. Yes — hello, nail on head. But there’s a lot of loving detail here and Hackman’s lyrics detail the psycho-emotional colors of intercourse as much as winningly blunt verses like “Remember that day when we’d never met and you begged me to ruin your life/ We didn’t even speak you just took my hand and held it between your thighs/ Cause our mouth is just for eating/ And our mouths are just for moaning/ Kissing and fucking/ Kissing and fucking.”
This is the kind of single that digs its earworms deep under your skin and really generates buzz for an album. Let’s hope the rest of Any Human Friend is as good. If I’m Not Your Man, and its “Boyfriend” single, are any indication, it will be. – Justin Vellucci, Swordfish, July 25, 2019
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