Bleep

Inner Song runs with the success of Kelly Lee Owens’ eponymous debut LP, an album where the London-based artist’s reverb-heavy vocals were layered atop melodious techno productions. However, this record also finds Owens pushing her sound further than she has done previously. On Inner Song, Owens’ vocals are more intimate, the club tracks hit even harder, and her stylistic experiments more daring.

Tracks such as ‘Arpeggi’, the Radiohead cover which begins Inner Song, and the John Cale collaboration ‘Corner Of My Sky’ find Owens maintaining the sonic palette of techno but pushing on into a zone of etherised electronics that draws from Spiritualized, Brian Eno and μ-Ziq. Owens says that Inner Song has emerged from a rather difficult period in her personal life, and on electro-ballads like ‘Re-Wild’ we find her facing down those experiences with some of her most forthright vocal performances to date. Glasser and Owens’ former collaborator Jon Hopkins would both be good points of comparison for these numbers. However, Owens does not allow her struggles to overshadow her love for the dancefloor - ‘Melt!’ and ‘Jeanette’ are the sort of steely-eyed, slightly trippy techno tools one associates with labels like Ostgut Ton and Stroboscopic Artefacts.

Kelly Lee Owens’ Inner Song is an LP that moves outwards from techno to take in an impressively varied array of electronic music styles.