American culture has long seen two notional opposites intimately entwined – the sacred and the profane. The latest chapter in a story that runs through so much US music is the debut album by Josiah “serpentwithfeet” Wise, an artist who fuses avant garde R&B with the devotional beauty of gospel, skirting easy classification. Soil is a beautiful, shape-shifting debut made by a former choirboy who, tangentially, identifies as a pagan.
It is, at its heart, an album about love: the intimacy of it, the rapture of it, the loss of it. Its forthcoming track Cherubim riffs hard on the quasi-religious potential of homoerotic adoration. Wise’s ecstatic voice ranges from falsetto flutter to proclamatory thrum on songs like Invoice – a grandiose, dramatic composition.
Mourning Song, by contrast, finds Wise, a classically trained singer, grieving a relationship, using vocal manipulation techniques to “sound like the demon”; imagine Perfume Genius remixed by Arca. After his breakout 2016 EP blisters, made with Björk’s collaborator the Haxan Cloak, Soil has contributions from sound-makers as diverse as Katie Gately, digital hip-hop hand Clams Casino, and even Paul Epworth (Adele), taking Wise’s vision into glorious sonic HD.
