This is aquamarine music. Like one of those stones you find at the beach that feels perpetually slick with seawater long after you’ve left. “Mermaid pop” is the descriptor most often associated with Buenos Aires-born singer/songwriter/producer Valerie Teicher, aka Tei Shi, and listening to her new EP "Verde" bears it out, ethereal vocals drifting over a lushly produced blend of pop-shoegaze-R&B. To listen to it is to feel the sunlight refracted down turquoise on you from beneath the surface of the water.
The EP opens with “I Can’t Be Sure,” wherein a slowly massing choir of Teichers gather to reiterate the song’s title like a mantra, or an answer to a question unheard. We are then launched into “Bassically,” which with a slight tilt of the head and a beefier synth bass could be mistaken for a Perturbator outtake, a dancefloor-ready pop-outrun beat propelling us forward as Teicher’s vaguely sinister vocals alternately pleading with--or is it tempting?--her other, invoking “Sexyback” (“Baby I’ll behave, if you let me stay”), and provoking, accusing. Shades of 10cc in her “Please don’t say/I’m begging you for love” (so don’t forget it!), and the cut of wondering, insinuating, that he might just be like all the other boys (not men), looking for “someone to throw, like the other toys,” or “drown, like the other noise.” Over all this, her increasingly furious wails, not a lament but a war cry—music to dress in leather and hunt a man down to; air this with Chairlift’s “Sidewalk Safari” for a righteous double shot.
"Verde" as a whole is a series of reflections on a desire for connection, and an array of reactions to connection deferred. If “Bassically” reacts to a possible rejection, “See Me” is a wistful gaze from afar, a slow-and-steady jackhammer procession, luscious bass, and a guitar that sounds like it’s being played a foot underwater tock-tocking away as Teischer wishes her Other would only notice her. They never look at the world around them, never see what she could be to them: “I care about the way you see me, I wanna wake you from this.” She says she’ll fight (for?) him “without fear,” although I cannot hear that line as anything other than “I’ll fight you with apathy,” a crunchy bit of passive-aggressive. The song ends with Teischer still “unravel[ing] your mistakes,” and on and around they go.
But then we have the EP’s highlight, “Go Slow.” A masterful piece of pop, a playful synth riff running rings around a mid-tempo R&B beat. Now Teischer has her Other within her grasp at last, is encouraging them to finally reach out to her: “If you giving what you giving to me/Feeling I can know my shame” (or is it “like a new machine?”). The multitracked choir from the opening track returns full force to back her up, a holographic universe of Teischers inviting her Other in with a tender compassion breathtaking in how completely it envelops you. “I wanna hear the phone booth scream…Baby, won’t you reach out to me?”
Closer “Get It” is a straight up R&B come-hither, Teischer having transcended her need—she knows they will come and get it “when they’re good and ready.” She can smell the sex in the air, the connection formed when “your arms around me melted and you pulled my hair,” that last repeated until it falls somewhere between a tease and a command. There’s something in Teischer’s repeated “get it get it get it get it get it get it” that only hints at the hunger Kate Bush ferociously expresses in the “gimme it gimme it gimmegimmegimmegimme” of “Sat In Your Lap,” but it’s evident nonetheless. When it comes to pop come-ons, “I knew it was love/I fit you like a glove” wins the prize for my favorite of the year already. "Verde" is only Teischer’s second EP, and my need for a full album release has grown mighty as I’ve let this breathe for the past week or so. Hopefully we’ll be seeing more from Tei Shi in the near future.
