Having Karen O rave about your work is certainly quite an endorsement. It’s not entirely surprising, though: Ocher sounds exactly as her image on the album cover suggests – namely a singular performer, and unquestionably eccentric. The 29-year-old Russian-born singer-songwriter, poet, director and visual artist is, without doubt, a one-off who defies convention in a world of conformity.
‘+ Your Government’ isn’t an album that sits comfortably anywhere. It doesn’t start from ground zero, and doesn’t exist in a cultural vacuum of its own making: it isn’t that far out. But it certainly isn’t chart material, and nor does it slot into any obvious pre-existing genre category. So how do you pitch this?
‘Dream X3’ finds glacial synths drifting over an insistent beat over which Ocher’s Kate Bush-esque vocals conjure a dream-like, opiate state, before eventually building to a whirling climax of thunderous percussion, earth-moving bass and wordless vocalisations of pure mania.
Tribal drumming dominates the darkly gothic ‘A new language’, which has heavy hints of Siouxsie and the Banshees, and ‘The sound of war’ continues in the thudding, post-punk vein.
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But the album’s packed with variety and experimentalism. Swathed in reverb, Ocher finds herself duelling against an industrial-edged electronic groove on ‘Man vs Air’ and comes on somewhere between Mark E Smith and Suicide as he drawls ‘bastards… get out’ and whinnies like a horse. Stalking the line between genius and madness with a theatrical flourish, ‘+Your Government’ shows Ocher to be an artist in the truest sense.
Like a cyberpunk Lady Gaga – or, indeed, with her plastic-framed glasses and home-cut hair, the anti-Gaga – Ocher clearly isn’t concerned with following trends, but driving them, appropriating from a range of sources and subverting them to forge something almost fictional in its appearance and feel, a larger-than-life version of dystopian pop.
Mary Ocher Online
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