Review: Primer – Incubator

Alyssa Midcalf, otherwise known as Primer, to you and I disguises songs about heartbreak and depression inside lovely new wave and pop hooks on her new album, Incubator – so named because many of these songs began their life before she was even twenty-years-old.

“Welcome to your life,” Midcalf sings on the opening track, “Impossible Thoughts,” which hooks you right away with its synth bass and beats. She’s welcoming us to our lives and the brief, yet intimate look at hers. “The world is ending, by the way. I accept it, but I don’t want to live that way,” she sings. She wrote that lyric, I’m fairly certain, about a break-up she experienced not long before finalizing the album, but one can’t help but put that lyric onto everything happening around us right now.

“Just a Clown” is a fun tongue-in-cheek poke at herself, as Midcalf discusses the hustle of being an artist and how you’re always setting yourself up for potential failure. “I can’t believe it has come to this. I am just a clown, and I’ll never win,” she says. Haven’t we all be there? Yes, but we haven’t all been there with the lovely dream pop beats Midcalf puts down on the track.

A groovy bass line uplifts the blue lyrics of her break-up on “If You Need Me,” taking the track to disco floor bliss. “Giving Up” builds with bright synth chords to become something that sounds like a happy kid skipping down the sidewalk, even as Midcalf sings heavy lyrics about waking from “a nightmare I constructed inside.”

“Things Fall Apart” has a swagger to it that seems to indicate that Midcalf was getting her feet back under her after the break-up dropped her to the mat. “Every day, I ask myself how do I live with the pain…”, she says, but she also knows she’s doing it. She’s able to move forward, even if only a little bit at a time. “Hypercube” is a flat-out industrial banger that will flood dance floors in clubs found behind metal doors in obscure alleys.

“I will never feel the same way that I did at that time in my life,” Midcalf sings on the heartbreaking “Anything,” a song about being desperate for love and willing to sacrifice whatever it takes for it. “Feel the Way I Do” is a love song for robots (judging from it’s cyber-beats and electro-bass) that practice magic. Midcalf sings about a strange thing inside of her that she wishes her lover could feel so they’d understand her love / anguish.

“You” starts off with android bees happily moving around in a bio-dome on a spaceship drifting past a gas giant planet. Midcalf sings about lying awake at nights missing her lover, but soon realizing “It never had a thing to do with you.” She’s the one who can control her response to the situation, and she does it with skillful synthwave. She’s reclaimed her life and heart on “Warning,” in which she sings, “I’m never gonna feel that way for you again.” while she dances around to her peppy beats.

It’s clear by the end of Incubator that Midcalf has grown from her experience, and perhaps we can grow with her if we’re willing.

Keep your mind open.

[I’m primed for you to subscribe.]

[Thanks to Gabriel at Clandestine Label Services.]