Oil Of Every Pearl's Un-Insides

While SOPHIE's music has never been simple, Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides' complexities and transformations make it a remarkable debut album that reveals more with each listen.

In SOPHIE's most intimate work yet, she subverts pop motifs into the catchiest form of self-assertion, reminding us all of why pop music still matters.

Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides does not remove all mystery, but is a powerful statement of identity, a shattering of traditional genre boundaries and nuanced, moving expressions of emotion where there once was an inscrutable deadpan. The fact that it all sounds so irresistibly good is the icing on the cake.

OIL’s resonance and bravery--underlined by its acutely mapped volatile and enrapturing production--is inspiring, and the conception and execution of its testimony remarkable.

This is the kind of music that, in 20 years, we may look back on as a pivotal point in changing the trajectory of the pop music sound.

Sophie combines sweet pop melodies and sounds with absolutely hideous noise--grinding, clanking, blaring, burbling, blurting, unpleasant and jarring sounds, wildly autotuned voices--to create a form of pop music that, if not entirely new, may never before have been presented in such extreme fashion.

SOPHIE manages to incorporate the personal without detracting from what set her apart in the first place, and it makes for a record that’s as affecting as it is thrilling.

By complicating the naturalness of the human voice and corrupting established pop structures, SOPHIE also complicates the supposed naturalness of gender, which has always been inextricable from music. Her work is a sphere where will and impulse take priority over fate and legacy.

Oil Of Every Pearl's Un-Insides, SOPHIE's first proper album, presents her artistic vision in a purer form than anything she's done before. It is at times unapologetically poppy, beginning with the opening power ballad, "It's Okay To Cry." But it's also utterly, defiantly weird, flouting conventions of rhythm, composition and, perhaps most of all, taste.

A personal triumph that continues her revamping of what pop means today. Its contents show a trajectory from acts like Art of Noise into ‘90s pop and Eurodance to today’s droning and experimental music by acts such as Lotic.

From its cryptic title to its discombobulating assemblage of stylistic approaches in the track listing, Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides is chaotic and disjointed. ... Bringing a range of seemingly contrasting elements together, SOPHIE has been problematising commonly accepted binaries since dropping the berserk dance pop of “BIPP” on Glasgow’s Numbers label in 2013. [Sep 2018, p.49]

As is often the case with PC Music-affiliated works, this is an album which displays, and not infrequently, extraordinary flashes of inspired production work, but can descend into tedium with as much suddenness. ... And when the whole affair does eventually draw to a close with the hum of an air conditioner and the sound of the flying Jony Ive heroine thing from Wall-E, you will probably give an audible sigh of relief. And then spin the whole album again.

Crossing boundaries of pop music and chasing transcendence, SOPHIE achieves the rare feat of making abstract, difficult electronic music that hits you straight in the heart.

Whatever she make you feel, it's a ferociously sensual work. [Summer 2018, p.117]

Packed with more than enough ideas to constitute what’s still ostensibly a “debut album,” OIL OF EVERY PEARL’s UN-INSIDES pushes new limits of bombast only to settle into the same sort of razor-sharp, high-concept pop that’s worked for SOPHIE since the beginning.

Despite software advances, so many electronic producers are content to lapse into nostalgia or a safe, compromised emotional range; Sophie has crafted a genuinely original sound and uses it to visit extremes of terror, sadness and pleasure.

She definitely goes further than Aguilera in tracks like “Ponyboy,” with a harsh beat that conjures smashed glass, or “Whole New World/Pretend World,” which stretches past the nine-minute mark. ... Yet the lyrics favor abstract concepts over intimate confessions; Sophie ponders consumerism in “Faceshopping” (“My face is the front of shop / My face is the real shop front”) and the power dynamics of sex in “Ponyboy.” Then there’s “Immaterial,” which feels like the key to apprehending this fascinating album.

Her first solo album shows that there are even more sides to this virtual-insanity innovator.

“It’s Okay To Cry,” “Ponyboy,” and “Faceshopping,” open the album in that order balancing SOPHIE’s pop instincts with her weirder ones. “Faceshopping” is a highlight, both visceral and compulsively listenable, using Photoshop as a metaphor for becoming more comfortable with her body.

SOPHIE effortlessly crosses detailed, quartz-like avant-garde production with pop's unapologetic, dizzying sugar rush. [Sep 2018, p.39]