#live Shilpa Ray took us for one last ride
What a night we had! Last night we had the chance to catch Shilpa Ray at the El Club in Detroit. This was her last stop on the July Talk tour and let us tell you this, she is a force to be reckoned with. We arrived at the show with her latest single “Lawsuits and Sucide” and came out with an album and a setlist.
We couldn’t help but felt like we were in a garage band in the 80s. It was raw, energetic, and rebellious. Everything we needed to hear on her last stop of the tour. We found ourselves shouting “EMT, Police, And the Fire Department” with her in due part of her energy. It sucks that this was her last stop but not the last tour. We will keep an eye out for her next tour. Stay tuned.
Shilpa has previously shared the Stooges-styled “Manic Pixie Dream Cunt,” the reverb-soaked dream-pop of “Heteronormative Horseshit Blues,” and the hard-charging “Bootlickers of the Patriarchy.” With the raging Portrait of a Lady, Ray has created her most searing and personal album to date. Written in the wake of the #metoo movement and the weathering years of the Trump Administration, the record finds Ray processing her own experiences with abuse, layering autobiographical detail with ferocious bon mots and surrealistic rock & roll gloss.
The idea for Portrait of a Lady stretches back to Ray’s experience with photos from Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a personal expose of the photographer’s time in the No Wave scene of New York in the late ‘70s. “It shook me to my core and made me reflect on my own experiences with sexual assault and abuse,” Ray says. She couldn’t shake the idea of a concept album—a full-throated rock album about being a survivor—but found herself hesitating until 2019 when she began to approach the concept in earnest. “I kept asking, ‘How do you do this?’ But Goldin’s work—as well as the writings of music journalist and musician Jes Skolnik—inspired Ray to throw herself into the difficult work.
To match her personal and fearless lyrics, which range from darkly funny to harrowing, Ray and her co-producer/collaborator Jeff Berner gather a wide batch of sounds, from unhinged garage rock to soulful ballads. Anger is present on the record, but it shares space with acceptance, gallows humor, and strength. “No survivor has a set way of dealing with what they had to survive. There’s no homogenized experience or interpretation of it,” Ray says. Portrait Of A Lady isn't a political record so much as a personal one, dedicated to “showing the good, the bad, and the ugly as well as the power one can ultimately hold being a survivor.”
