Princess Chelsea "Aftertouch" 2016

...She had already made a few demos of original songs and even appeared in a spontaneous if tentative performance as Princess Chelsea at a Camp A Low Hum in 2007, but now she committed herself to her solo project. Jonathan Bree showed her how to use Pro Tools and, using the bedroom of her Eden Terrace flat as her studio, she began to record what would become Princess Chelsea’s debut album, Lil’ Golden Book. It took two years to piece together and finally came out in 2011...
...In many ways it epitomises what had become the Lil’ Chief brand: alternative pop without the usual wall of guitars; traces of retro (especially sixties girl groups like the Crystals and the Shangri-Las) yet a contemporary embrace of electronics; and a withering, ironic view of modern love.
It also included what would become a bona fide hit, ‘The Cigarette Duet’ – a one-act play in miniature, in which a passive-aggressive male bickers with his female partner over her recreational smoking. With the help of a brilliantly deadpan video featuring Chelsea (in pink wig and heart-shaped sunglasses) and Jonathan Bree exchanging droll lines in a hot tub, it has notched up over 70 million streams on YouTube and almost as many on Spotify.
The sound of the album revolves around electronic keyboards, which she began using at an early age. In Teen Wolf she rocked a Roland E-20 synthesiser; even earlier, she acquired a red Yamaha “keytar” left behind in a rental house her family moved into. (You can see her with it, at around age five, in home footage she used for the 2018 ‘Growing Older’ video.)
Listening to the album now, she says, she finds “kind of cringy because I can hear the fake harps and stuff,” yet she acknowledges it has a quality that can’t be repeated. “Lil’ Golden Book is kinda the sound of me learning to record and produce. It’s pretty much Chelsea Learns Pro Tools! So while to my ears it’s kind of naff in parts, I really like the naivety and charm of it.”
In 2012 she toured Europe for the first time as Princess Chelsea, fronting a four-piece line-up with Jonathan Bree, Jamie Lee Smith, and Miles McDougall.
Her next album, The Great Cybernetic Depression, released in 2015, was more sophisticated. Expanding her electronic world into a kind of sonic metaphor, it is a cycle of electro-pop songs that wallow in lonely reflection. Though it is again mostly Chelsea alone with her synths, Bree makes the occasional appearance, playing drums, singing ‘Too Many People’ and alternate verses on ‘Is It All OK?’, and breaking up the solitary reveries with a stadium-rock guitar solo on a song titled (with Prince-style spelling) ‘We Were Meant 2 B’. To support the album, she toured Europe in 2015 with Jonathan Pearce, Jackson Hobbs (Sharpie Crows), and Jonathan Bree.
It was followed closely by Aftertouch, a surprising album of classic covers, Chelsea-style. If you ever wondered how Nirvana’s ‘Come As You Are’, Lucinda Williams’ ‘Side of the Road’ or Elvis Presley’s ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’ would sound as shimmering reverb-laden reveries, the answers are all here.
But her next release, 2018’s The Loneliest Girl, returned to the original songwriting that defined her first two albums. In ever-more elaborate settings, it found the girl-and-her-synths joined by strings, guitars and live drums. Again it starts out as a fairy tale: “‘Once there was a funny girl,” she sings, accompanied by what sound like showers of synthesiser stardust. But already there’s something wrong with the picture. The funny girl falls in love with a strange boy (“he was weird, he had no joy”). They move in together and never go out, watch a lot of television and, “though she knew he’d break her heart”, as she sings in the final verse, “they never were apart”. It’s low self-esteem and high anxiety dressed up as storybook romance, the hopeful innocence of the music just making it all the more disturbing...to be continued... - Nick Bollinger and AudioCulture

trax:
01 Next Exit 02 Come as You Are 03 Can't Help Falling in Love 04 Morning Sun 05 Side of the Road 06 And I Love Her 07 Aftertouch 08 Cold Glass Tube 09 After the Moment 10 It's Nothing (Bonus)
…served by Gaius…