Bristol-based singer-songwriter’s second album explores the wilderness years.
Billy Nomates
★★★★
CACTI
INVADA. CD/DL/LP
“I should not have come/I do not feel OK,” sings Tor Maries over the fairground lurch of her new track Roundabout Sadness, “I brought myself/Brought myself here anyway.” Being in the wrong place at the wrong time is a hallmark of Maries’s work as Billy Nomates: her songs vibrate with unease, uncomfortable in their skin, uncomfortable in the world. It made sense that her early champions Sleaford Mods had her drawl “You’re not from round here”, like a B-movie sheriff, on their bleak 2021 single Mork N Mindy. Maries understands alienation, the unfunny kind that doesn’t come in stripy jumper and braces.
That’s not to say she can’t do deadpan comedy: 2020’s self-titled debut included the precariat nine to five of Call In Sick (“If I come in Debbie/I’m going to take down the whole team”) and environmental inactivism song Hippy Elite, outlining the scheduling conflict between saving the planet and holding down a day job. With CACTI, however, the narrative lines are fractured, the satire removed; these songs play out like stress responses, fight-or-flight impulses, each one a little panic room.
Echoing her lockdown experiences – living with her father on the Isle Of Wight, fearing her hard-won first record had vanished into the pandemic void – CACTI is often locked in a disturbing synth-pop groove. “I just go round and round,” Maries sings on out-of-joint opening track Balance Is Gone. Vertigo – LCD Soundsystem if they dragged their equipment about in plastic laundry bags – finds itself on an unexpected precipice; Apathy Is Wild, a shiver of Psychedelic Furs about it, almost casually follows the title with “blow your brains out”, as if it’s a reflex thought, an escape hatch.
Her stage name came from a jeer aimed at her while she watched a band alone, but there’s a real sense of Maries being out on her own, despite her easy conversational phrasing. Spite’s thrashy vitriol weaponises her very presence (“I didn’t come here to try to put things right”); Blue Bones (Death Wish) is deadly co-dependence disco. The desert imagery of CACTI or Saboteur Forcefield, combined with her dusty twang, underline the Lone Ranger mood.
There are atypical moments – Fawner’s country strum, the vintage Cate Le Bon dankness of Roundabout Sadness – but these songs most often feel like somebody dealing with freefall by forcing structure on it, putting it to a compelling beat. “The hope that you held is bitter, rotten and fallowed,” she says on Apathy Is Wild, “but you can hold a room every once in a while.” There’s not a lot of feeling OK on CACTI, but for once, it feels like exactly the right place for Billy Nomates. She’s brought herself, entirely.
CACTI is out 13 January, via Invada
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