Indigo De Souza’s “Any Shape You Take” is a fun and catchy album, full of adventurous songs and moments of intense emotion. It’s an album from an artist who freely explores different ways of songwriting and different forms of expression. De Souza takes her songs in whatever direction she’s moved to take them, sometimes joining two seemingly sort of disparate songs into one song (for example, with “Real Pain,” which combines a slow strummed-guitar and gentle percussive beginning with a full-band power pop segment at the end) through sheer personality and confidence. “Any Shape You Take” feels both old and new, too. De Souza writes with the freedom of someone who’s listened to and absorbed a lot of music, from many traditions—but there’s also a distinct vibe of 90s rock running through the album’s songs. It’s in the combination of De Souza’s voice and the way some of the songs move, but it brings to mind the catchiest and heaviest parts of albums like Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill” or 4 Non Blondes’s “Bigger, Better, Faster, More!” (Or more recently something like Forth Wanderers’ LP—De Souza sounds a little like FW’s Ava Trilling).
“Hold U” is one of the best tracks on the album, a sweet song of praise. “You are a good thing, I’ve noticed, I’ve noticed/and I want a good thing with you.” De Souza sings about loving the people who surround us, the people we care for and who care for us. “Hold U” has such a beautiful upbeat feel, a “singing into your hairbrush” kind of song (this is a half-remembered quote from the writer Mary H.K. Choi re Haim’s first album).
“Kill Me” is De Souza singing about the simultaneous push-and-pull of a passionate but difficult relationship, one that she maybe knows is not right for her but that she can’t resist anyway. She captures what it’s like to feel at once so devoted to the other person that you’d drop everything for them and also knowing, in the back of your mind, that the dynamic is off, it’s not gonna last, even though you wish it could last and stay good. At the start of the song, she sings, “Kill me slowly, take me with you/Down to the garden where magnolias bloom/Baby darling devil, I love you/I love you, I love you—kill me in the morning.” And later, “Kill me slowly, outside that diner that we liked to go to when things/were okay.” It’s a gorgeous song, volatile and vulnerable, the perfect ending to a really special album.