Hand Habits – Fun House
Meg Duffy is known for a particular kind of soft melodicism,
crafting her last two albums with the prowess of an adept multi-instrumentalist,
and fine-tuning their work down to their most minimalist kernels. Duffy’s Hand
Habits moniker has always served a particularly personal role, giving them a
chance to emerge from behind the countless touring bands or albums credits she’s
featured in, always recorded on tour or on short breaks in her schedule. While
recording Fun House, however, Duffy enlisted her roommate Sasami
Ashworth for production duties, a decision that allowed their proximity and
familiarity to pull the project into an entirely new direction. Sasami
encouraged Duffy to embellish the tracks, laying on more instrumentation and giving
the work a more confident and brighter tone. That tone stands in contrast with
the stifled and traumatic place those tracks came from, and even at its mildest
moments, Duffy asserts themself with an energetic catharsis.
Duffy didn’t intend to make an “ambitious” album, nor did they
really intend to make it introspective. When COVID-19 ended Duffy’s seemingly nonstop
touring schedule, they found themself, like many musicians, forced into isolated
reflection. That forced contemplation allowed Duffy to come to terms with themself,
realizing their trans identity and attempting to push themself outside of their
comfort zone. The result feels like a breakthrough, an album that owes itself
to individuality and exploration, the kind of album that could easily be
self-titled. That tone lands Fun House in the same camp as Perfume Genius,
an artist whose identity courses through each of his albums even at their most
stylistically different. In fact, Mike Hadreas contributes his vocals on “Just
to Hear You” and “No Difference”, providing a counterbalance to Duffy’s hushed delivery
and harmonizing their voices to better suit the instrumentation.
Both Hadreas and Sasami loom large over Fun House,
but like the title, they serve only to distort and transform the album into
something different. When Duffy began writing songs for their new album, they
were soft, acoustic demos, the kind of music that necessitated understanding
and analysis. But much like the changes in their own life, these songs grew
into themself, revealing the importance of the song’s gestation, Duffy’s
reckoning with their identity, and the strength of the seeds themselves.
~9.5
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