Her press bio is much improved. Average score, not quite…
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[5.11]
Thomas Inskeep: Written by Liz Phair, but you’d never know it, as this simply goes to the Born to Die well for a quick would-be cash grab. Poorly, it should be added.
[2]
Patrick St. Michel: She’s traded in the nondescriptness of “Love Burning Alive” for… a Lorde impersonation?
[4]
Alfred Soto: Over a dolorous plod, Fayre does a persuasive imitation of Shirley Manson in her Goth-is-real metaphoric histrionics. As exercises go, not unpleasant.
[5]
Iain Mew: Gosh, this is almost as haunting as Patrick Wolf’s similarly themed “Demolition”. Even after mixing an Imogen Heap-like vocal and electronic frolics around the central numb collapse, they just feel like so many distraction tactics to try to think about anything else than the all-encompassing feeling that nothing reliable remains.
[8]
Micha Cavaseno: There seem to be four or five songs here that could be good, but I’m not sure which Fayre wants to go with.
[3]
Crystal Leww: There’s a moment in “I Am Not a Man” where the production twists “what” and “run” into something indistinguishable from one another, and Lena Fayre continues on to the next line like it’s nothing. That moment of robotic manipulation grabs you in, shows you something. There are a few others in “I Am Not a Man,” but ultimately this flounders way too long with the typical.
[5]
Brad Shoup: The big relief here is that this is Fayre’s voice, not goosed with pitchshifting to add dread or to surprise. (There’s a little bit of backmasking or something when she sings “run run run,” but that’s about it.) The folktronica backing slowly lopes, snapping from dusky twang to wheedly drone; Fayre similarly leaps from doomy metaphor to a plea for emotional clarity.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: Liz Phair co-wrote this, which is massively heartening because it means Funstyle didn’t prompt the industry to exile her to some remote star. If it were a decade ago, a Phair credit would mean “I Am Not a Man” would sound like The Matrix producing Katy Rose, but it’s 2014, which means this sounds mostly like Lorde and thus lugubrious. Yet I find things to like anyway: the chord change at 1:25, the processing on “what,” the stately songwriting arc I always think Lorde songs will finally fall into if I give just one more listen, the pool and craw to Fayre’s vocal, the matter-of-fact surrealism of “I am not a man / I feel more like chemicals coming through.”
[6]
Anthony Easton: It is autumn, so the catastrophe of winter fast approaches. This makes me seek work like as a kind of melancholic solidarity.
[6]