【译】叉婊Pitchfork评Banoffee 2020年专辑《Look At Us Now Dad》

搬运自：微信公众号【评论搬一堆】（在原文基础上添加了英语原文与排版调整） 

翻译：Wendy Lee

校对：Tyler Smith

排版：Ryan-Chopin

Martha Brown goes from Charli XCX band member to pop singer on her debut, tackling intergenerational trauma and the painful path to self-understanding with a melodic bubblegum sound.

Martha Brown 从前是Charli XCX 的乐队成员，后来通过自己的首张专辑，一跃成为流行歌手。她的声音优美如泡泡糖，治愈代际的心灵创伤，沿着痛苦的道路，通向自我认知。

Before she played synths for Charli XCX on Taylor Swift’s 2018 Reputation tour, Martha Brown was failing to get by in Los Angeles as a musician transplanted from Melbourne. Her career-aiding spot in Charli’s band saved her from moving home, and she used what she earned from the tour to finance her debut LP, Look At Us Now Dad. Although the title might evoke the image of a daughter beaming with pride at having made it, Brown, who performs as Banoffee, actually uses parts of her debut to examine deeper concepts, like intergenerational trauma and the painful path to self-understanding.

Martha Brown从墨尔本移居到洛杉矶，作为音乐人，一直连糊口都困难，后来，她就在Taylor Swift 的2018年名誉巡演中给Charli XCX 伴奏电子合成器。成为Charli 乐队的成员，她终于不用再四处流浪，而且她把巡演挣的钱用来制作个人首张LP——《Look At Us Now Dad （老爸，看看我们吧）》。尽管这个名字可能让人想象出这样的画面：女儿骄傲地绽放出笑脸，兴奋地要和老爸分享成功的喜悦。但是Brown（演出时的名字叫Banoffee）实际上是在用首张LP检验更深的概念，诸如代际间的心灵创伤，自我认知路上的痛苦等。

Enlisting features from electro-pop singer Empress Of and rapper CupcakKe, Brown aims for a melodic bubblegum pop sound with industrial undertones—a well-established trend in queer music. On “Chevron,” a downtempo lament sung at rock bottom, she asks the album’s persistent questions: “What am I doing? Why am I here?” The song arrives at the album’s midpoint, rejecting an easy redemptive arc in favor of a steady landscape of ups and downs. To her credit, Banoffee never settles on answers to those questions but never gives up the pursuit of them, either.

Brown从电子流行歌手Empress Of和说唱歌手CupcakKe那里吸收特点，力求把工业低音融进优美的泡泡糖流行乐——这种融合是queer音乐（一种同性恋音乐流派）由来已久的趋势。“Chevron（雪佛龙）”的故事非常悲伤，节奏较慢，音调也很低。在这首歌中，她问出了一直萦绕于专辑的问题：“我在做什么？为什么我在这里？”这首歌在专辑的正中间，整个故事没有沿着那种简单的救赎式弧线发展，而是一种稳定的起起伏伏。值得赞扬的是，尽管Banoffee从未确定过这些问题的答案，可她也从未放弃追问这些问题。

The interludes “I Lied” and “I Let You Down” offer a graceful view into the album’s focus on reconciliation—with relationships, with the self, and with the past. Bookending the album, they contain the same lyrics: Banoffee sings about lying to a dying loved one, telling them that she’s doing well in an effort to spare them worry. While “I Lied” introduces deception into Banoffee’s role as a narrator, “I Let You Down” reframes her lies as promises to herself. Over synths that buzz like insects circling a light, she allows herself the possibility that one day those lies might become truth.

插曲“I Lied（我说谎了）”和“I Let You Down（我让你失望了）”优雅地向我们展示了专辑的主题“和解”——不同的代际关系寻求和解，与自我和解，与过去和解。到专辑结尾，两个插曲都包含着相同的歌词：在深爱的人垂死之时，向他说了谎，谎称自己过得很好，因为不想让他们担心。在“I Lied”里，叙述者Banoffee引入了“谎言”，而“I Let You Down”将谎言重塑为Banoffee对自己的承诺。电子合成器嗡嗡地响，像昆虫正在绕着电灯飞，在合成器的伴奏中，她期待着终有一天那些谎言会变成现实。 

On the album’s second half, Banoffee probes the connection between her own psychological battles and her father’s, whose tumultuous childhood included a forced separation from his alcoholic parents. “Permission” is an intensely Auto-Tuned account of assault, and Banoffee’s quivering voice rises to a broken yell as she flips perspectives from perpetrator to victim. “I was young and never wanted/To touch a man or be a woman.” Despite the cyborgian vocals, the song has a shuddering, human ache, taking a cue from similarly produced tracks on Charli XCX’s Pop 2 mixtape like “Backseat” and “Lucky.”

在专辑的后一半，Banoffee探究了自己的心理斗争和爸爸的心理斗争有怎样的关系。爸爸的童年非常混乱，被迫跟酗酒的父母分离。“Permission（允许）”利用auto-tune记述了种种伤害，Banoffee的声音颤抖着，音调越来越高，角度从施加者转为受害者之时，她已经变成了破音般的呐喊。“我还小，从来不想/碰男人，也不想成为女人”。虽然只是声乐作品，但这首歌饱含人的痛苦，令人颤栗，灵感来自和它类似的两首歌“Backseat（后座）”“Lucky（幸运）”（都是Charli XCX的混音带《Pop 2（流行歌曲2）》的曲目）。

On the closing title track, she attempts to wind her own emotional experiences together with her father’s. The song, the longest on the album, addresses her father directly as well as the suffering he inherited: “What was theirs is yours, and now it’s mine.” The placement implies closure, as if the song proves that there’s some new way forward for the two of them. Instead, it introduces the album’s most interesting material right at the end. If she had threaded it more steadily throughout, the album would have been a more keen statement than the respectable pop offering that it is.

专辑最后一曲是同名曲，她试图将自己的情感经历和爸爸的情感经历结合起来，是专辑中最长的曲目。歌中，她直接向爸爸倾诉情感，也直言爸爸继承来的痛苦：“你曾经继承了痛苦，现在你又把它传给了我”。这句话暗示着结束，好像这首歌要证明父女二人面前还有新的道路可走，可是相反，它最后引出了专辑最有趣的部分。如果把这最有趣的部分贯穿专辑始终，专辑就不只是一张不错的专辑了，更像是一个热烈的宣言。