Though she's released only one full-length and a short four-song companion, Merrill Garbus is has already demonstrated some serious range with her tUnE-yArDs project. BiRd-BrAiNs veered from haunting to folk to singer-songwriter pop to loop-driven tracks infused with R&B, and "Real Live Flesh", one of the songs found on last month's BiRd-DrOpPiNgS EP, does a terrific job of combining all of these elements. The layering of her voice is more prominent here than anything on BiRd-BrAiNs: Wordless syllables are used to sketch out the chords, versions of her purring in her higher register sort of curl around each other like wafts of smoke, and there's almost no instrumentation other than minimal percussion and swirls of cut-up sound. She cuts the ethereal prettiness and ratchets up the intensity with a few gutbucket yowls, hitting on a phrase ("Been away so long/ You love me only in your dreams") that continues a theme explored several times on the LP: what happens to desire when it can't find an outlet? Add reports of an impressive live show, currently on display during her tour with Dirty Projectors, and tUnE-yArDs becomes the sort of project where you can't wait to hear what happens next. From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/11670-real-live-flesh/
