Diana Hou records as Blushfire, and A Storm the Size of Four Earths is quite a title to put on a song about wanting somebody. Her third single takes the prospect of falling in love seriously enough to involve Jupiter, with NASA samples among its materials. I’m more interested in the anxiety inside that enormous proposition: the desire to be consumed by somebody and the survival instinct that kicks in at the thought.
Hou initially leaves her voice exposed, then gradually crowds it with further versions of itself. The higher layers reach upwards while a pitched-down, guttural voice drags the music towards something bodily and ugly. I enjoy the friction, especially when the drums become more explosive and the arrangement starts accumulating voices. Her singing has to contend with the production she has built around it. Surrender sounds appealing here, although the lower vocal has a nastiness that complicates the invitation. Falling for somebody can involve an alarming amount of enthusiasm for your own bad judgement.
The busiest passages test my patience a little, with the production, including additional work from Avatar Lilith, piling so much around an already expressive singer. I’d trade some of that accumulation for more of the opening’s vulnerability. Hou makes the exposed voice compelling enough that I want to hear it remain at risk for longer.
The accompanying image of a body floating in a bathtub among tiny boats is a particularly good extension of that unease. A bath is an ordinary place to surrender your weight; the miniature vessels turn the person inside it into something absurdly large. A ramp descending straight into a lake offers another invitation to keep going past the sensible stopping point. The bathtub image has a peculiar intimacy, with a domestic setting carrying an outsized drama. Hou’s art-pop ambition is clearest in such details, where a recognisable experience becomes slightly troubling. I’d follow her further into that kind of strangeness, especially with a voice capable of making attraction sound this hazardous.
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