Missouri-born singer-songwriter Kristeen Young has been producing her unique cocktail of ‘dissonant piano bashing, operatic vocals and serrated lyrics’ since her debut album Meet Miss Young And Her All Boy Band in 1997. She has toured and worked with artists such as Morrissey and David Bowie. Kristeen Young is the rarest of beasts - a musician on their 11th album who still sounds, and looks, like they are fresh out of the gate, with all the vitality, energy and innovation that suggests. An artist brimming with ideas and idiosyncrasies, laser-focused on living in the here and now. In a world where pop-culture, aimed at even the youngest demographic, is awash with nostalgia this a musical unicorn indeed.
Backed by a series of arresting, self-made videos, The Beauty Shop was released digitally last month with a physical edition to follow in September. It is a fabulously rage-infused genre-mash of left field punk opera, discordant instrumentation and sublime melodies that isn’t afraid to touch on the darker aspects of personal and political life. Written as a song cycle detailing “snapshots of the life of a serial killer with each song based on a major emotion” the album, Kristeen says, is a metaphor for contemporary American culture exploring “how life can systematically kill your emotions”. More personally, and evocatively, the touchstone for the album was a real life salon: “I grew up in a beauty shop. My adopted mom had a shop in our little house. My adopted dad walled in a breezeway to make the shop.”
The title evokes a ’50s/’60s retro feel, somewhere between Little Shop of Horrors and Beauty School Drop Out, that connects with the fucked-up version of old school glamour on display in the visuals. There is a conflict present in the videos that many women can relate to, as they appear to pick apart our own sense of image from the commercialized product of femininity and female adornment. From: https://louderthanwar.com/kristeen-young-interview/
