Self Esteem ‘A Complicated Woman’ review: Power, joy and pop positivity

If I’m so empowered, why am I such a coward / If I’m so strong, why am I broken?” asks Self Esteem, aka Rebecca Lucy Taylor, on ‘I Do and I Don’t Care’, the opening track on her third album A Complicated Woman. Hopeless though the outspoken pop diva may sound, these contradictions are an invitation into the spectacularly more interesting grey area where two things can be true at once. 

Paradoxical thinking is nothing new to Taylor, who cut a choppy path to liberation on her widely acclaimed second album Prioritise Pleasure, having gone solo from indie duo Slow Club in 2017. Lamenting cycles of misogyny, feminist anxieties and societal pressures, it was a brave, bolshy portrayal of all her knotty complexities, delivered with a refreshing dose of her trademark irreverence. Now, after some time spent honing her theatrics with a turn playing Sally Bowles in the West End Revival of Cabaret, Taylor returns just as conflicted, but a great deal more enlightened. 

A Complicated Woman presents its titular thesis as Taylor finds fun and freedom in life’s eternal incompleteness. There’s no cheeky subterfuge or smirking ulterior motives here; it’s all out on the table, her lyrical realism as relatable as ever. “How many trains can I cry on in a lifetime?” she asks plainly atop a sun-splashed dance-pop groove on ‘Cheers to Me’. Elsewhere, she admits to a tricky relationship with alcohol on the gospel climax of ‘The Curse’: “I wouldn’t do it if it didn’t fucking work.”  

Still, there’s an on-brand absurdity that such uplifting instrumentals — in the realm of “montage music for the World Cup”, as she put it recently — could soundtrack an inspirational monologue about following your dreams. Such blatant clashes of sound and subject matter shouldn’t work as well as they do here; one moment Taylor is running through a checklist of her sexual dos and don’ts on smouldering electronic dance track ‘69’, featuring the drag queen Meatball, and the next she’s leading a choir at megachurch-level decibels on ‘What Now’.  

But it’s the hyperpop bombshells that signal the biggest shake-up, from the whirring electronic bassline and lashing snares on ‘Lies’ (featuring Nadine Shah) to the early 2010s-indebted ‘Mother’, on which she bemoans the inequality of emotional labour set to a ping-ponging beat. Like all her best songs, there’s still plenty of sincerity, particularly on the choral-led ‘Focus Is Power’, which features a female empowerment mantra we can all get behind: “My focus is powerful.”  

Then there’s the guest contributions from Life Without Buildings vocalist Sue Tompkins (‘Logic, Bitch!’), former Coronation Street actor Julie Hesmondhalgh (‘If Not Now, It’s Soon’) and former collaborator Moonchild Sanelly (‘In Plain Sight’), which invite their own moments of quiet contemplation. 

Ultimately, though, what we’re left with is a message of hope. “You’ll always work it out,” Taylor resolves on jubilant closer ‘The Deep Blue Okay’. After all, it’s the trying among the mystery of it all that makes us human, and here Taylor shows us just how spectacularly that can be done.