Released: 1st February 2019
Rating: ★★★★★
Cherry Glazerr are not messing about. Their new album ‘Stuffed & Ready’ is a sharply tuned exercise in exposure, as Clementine Creevy turns her gaze inward and sifts through her own guts for inspiration. The result is a crystalline, searingly honest record that feels as broad-reaching as it does intimate. After all, in the approximately two years since Cherry Glazerr’s second album Apocalypstick dropped on Trump’s 2017 inauguration day, the personal has become more political than ever.
There’s a keen sense of loneliness throughout ‘Stuffed & Ready’, a reflection of a young person who feels somewhat adrift and out of place in the culture, she has found herself in. On ‘Self Explained’, for example, Clementine sings about spending a lot of time by yourself, and feeling that people don’t like you in an embarrassed sort of way – as if it makes you broken, or weird, or hateful. ‘Stuffed & Ready’ doesn’t shy away from intimacy, but revels in it; ‘Distressor’’s assertion of wanting to ‘drown in my own noise’ feels like it encapsulates the album’s entire universe in a single line.
And then, Dear Reader, and then – there’s ‘Daddi’. Sugary but vicious, icy, and quite frankly phenomenal. We like to like things here at Dork, and this skewering of the weird infantilisation of women could have a whole page all to itself. ‘Stuffed & Ready’ is packed to the actual gills with great tracks, like the grungy ‘Stupid Fish’ and the fluid, slightly more synth-oriented ‘Pieces’, so the fact that ‘Daddi’ stands out so far from the pack is truly mind-blowing. We might need a little lie-down. It’s like we said; Cherry Glazerr aren’t messing around with ‘Stuffed & Ready’. They mean business.
Liam Konemann
