Brooklyn-via-Argentina singer-songwriter Tei Shi’s (Valerie Teicher) critically acclaimed debut album Crawl Space (2017) may have departed from the power pop arrangements on her breakout 2013 hit "Bassically", but the promising expansions of her sonic range and vocal techniques on the album is nevertheless accompanied with a dogged preoccupation with how romantic attachments can both empower and imprison you.
This dissonance is more readily apparent in tracks like “How Far”, where her fluid and whispery vocals dramatically escalate into a powerful siren-like wail to mirror her burgeoning inner turmoil. On a track like “Baby”, however, the sultry, intimate and mesmerizing playfulness of her delicately layered vocals distract from mentions of the more sinister aspects of being in a relationship. The track’s minimalistic lo-fi instrumentation allows a heightened prominence to her vocals, allowing the reverberations of each coo, whisper, sigh and shout to fully occupy your eardrums.
The pleasant chorus of sighs (‘Oh, baby love’) and heady promises of eternal devotion (‘To lose you/ Is something I refuse to do’) makes it harder to digest the eerie, prophetic statements that marry intimate bliss with sinister gothic undertones: ‘But hold me close, and we can dance to the violence/ Let me know, I wanna go down in silence’.
Tei Shi has described her own work as ‘mermaid music’, which rightfully emphasizes the fluid, ephemeral and shape-shifting sonic qualities of her oeuvre. The eerie quality that underwrites the playful, breezy and sensual nature of tracks like “Baby” seems to serve as a reminder of the myth's more morbid aspects: mermaids were often equated with sirens, and lonely, homesick sailors were often spellbound by the beauty of their otherworldly voices before experiencing a fatal shipwreck. Tei Shi's voice often seems to be a melodic harbinger of her own possible doom, and it is only apt that visual signifiers of danger (tarantulas, jumping onto the windscreen of a moving car) have becoming a fixture in her latest music videos.
