The lead singer for the barn-burning punk act Camp Cope shifts into synth-pop and romantic love for her solo debut.
Not long after recording Camp Cope's 2018 barn-burning second album How to Socialise and Make Friends, lead singer Georgia McDonald decided to stop screaming. Her rousing delivery elevated the Melbourne band's songs to fevered peaks; on tracks like "The Opener," McDonald bemoaned the misogynist music industry with irony and venom dripping from her voice. Before recording her solo debut, the singer took voice lessons to soften her singing and sound more like she'd always wanted to sound. "Instead of just yelling, I'm trying to actually make something that sounds beautiful to me," she said in a recent interview. "There's no angry screaming about anything anymore."
Pleaser, the first record McDonald has released on her own as Georgia Maq, strays far from Camp Cope. She places her voice in an almost entirely synthesized milieu, a dramatic shift facilitated by producers Katie Dey and Darcy Baylis. The album's subject matter suits its new dressings: Instead of singing about politics or family, or the complex and sometimes destructive bonds between friends, McDonald focuses on romantic love and self-love, romance's quiet counterpart. She aims for pop bliss, but her melodies, which tend to be simple and reiterative, don't let her lift off.
Most of the production fine-tunes '80s pop techniques to 21st-century ends. The pearly leads and bright, expressive snare on "Driving Blind" sound siphoned from Body Talk-era Robyn, while "You'll Be Singing My Name," one of the record's livelier cuts, adopts a bouncy piano backdrop that echoes the instrumentation on Lorde's "Green Light." With its binaural synth strobe and melancholy vocal lines, "Like a Shadow" could be mistaken at first listen for one of the moodier tracks off Caroline Polachek's recent solo debut. McDonald has no regrets about leaving her punk roots in the dust, but her voice can sound slack against its newly airless environment. She's ironed out the particulars of the singular and commanding voice she cultivated with Camp Cope and hasn't tailored herself a new set of idiosyncrasies, leaving a blankness at the center of her singing.