Album Review: Perfect Picture by Hannah Diamond

Most improved artist of the year? The premise behind PC Music longtimer Hannah Diamond is that three dimensions' worth of content will sound all the more evocative compressed into two dimensions' worth of depth. Never mind that this is the literal pitch for "Poster Girl", a sparkly banger on which Diamond contemplates whether she might escape her real-life real-girl insecurities transformed into a pin-up (spoiler alert, it's embracing your flaws that makes you you!) - this impression of concerted shallowness is written into the way she and her iconoclastic label have treated their aesthetic from the start, from ultra-synthetic production stylings throttled into reverb-starved tones to wilfully bland delivery of humdrum subject matter and vocals pitch-shifted to the tune of a particularly blasé android. Now, I've had a lot to say elsewhere about the inanimate, mechanical or digitally modulated treatment of lyrics that resonate a thousand times more cogently for how their impersonal feints force you to pin down the humanity in them.

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PC Music, the pioneering label of which Hannah Diamond is a founding member, has always embodied the nightmarish realisation of promises made to a generation raised on the idea that “forever” was an option. This generation witnessed the advent of the internet and social media in our childhood homes and heard pop songs that echoed the euphoria of the 90s’ ecstasy boom. Yet, our own ecstasy boom never materialised, our musical epiphanies mediated through pre-roll ads on YouTube and weaponised by a culture that exists only abstractly.

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Tags: Hannah Diamond, Reviews, Album Reviews.

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