People Like Us - Copia

A Closer Listen

The magic of a People Like Us album is the juxtaposition of the blissfully nostalgic with the eerie. Vicki Bennett masterfully imbues beloved, familiar songs with an edge of menace or discomfort. The music is as appealing as it is warped, as delightful as it is unsettling. Her work as People Like Us is in dialogue with much of the last several decades worth of musical re-treadings of the past; the saccharine nostalgia of Vaporwave, as well as the more sardonic fusions of plunderphonics, and the uncanniness of hauntology (an especially important point of reference given Bennett’s Britishness).

Bennett has ventured far across the history of pop music over the course of her career but her bread and butter are standards and the silky smooth pop of the 1960s and 70s. On Copia, the artist’s first full-length release since 2018, Bennett once again mines those histories for a masterclass in musical collage. Originating with a live AV performance the artist produced entitled, fittingly, “The Library of Babel,” Copia is peak People Like Us.  

There’s lots of Disney, Bacharach, James Bond, and other nostalgia-drenched easy listening film soundtracks here, including the central recurrence of Percy Faith’s syrupy sweet Theme from a Summer Place. Everything is mangled and cut-up of course, but also, as is often the case with a People Like Us album, allowed to persist long enough to pull on the heartstrings. On songs like “LSD Cha Cha,” for example, the smoothness of Burt Bacharach is marred by squeaks, blips, and abruptly interrupted vocal samples.

The second track on the album, “You wish — Dark World Remix,” offers an ideal sampling of the People Like Us vibe. “When You Wish Upon a Star” serves as the track’s foundation on top of which Bennett layers brooding, distant minor keys and strings, fragments of lyrics (with an especial emphasis on the skipping of the word ‘wish’), surface from a mélange of scrapes, rustles, and beeps. It comes as no surprise when the equally wistful melody from “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” also appears, albeit briefly, at the track’s end.

“I was born, you live” is another classic. The track begins energetically, featuring a brief fragment of John Barry and Leslie Briscusse’s lushly orchestrated “You Only Live Twice,” but is ultimately oriented around a sample from another ode to hope, Rose Royce’s 1977 disco track “Wishing on a Star.” (Another great feature here is a brief sample of Lee Marvin singing “Wandrin’ Star” from Paint Your Wagon). As opposed to its predecessor, this song does manage to cohere a bit more solidly, lapsing more completely into pure aural pleasure. That back and forth between the two, between indulgence and withholding that takes advantage of listener’s deeply engrained expectations is what we’ve come to expect from Bennett.  

People Like Us has always been a meta project. Bennett is not just playing, she is a highly conceptual artist. There is theory behind the work and Copia is no exception. Copia itself means copy marking this album as particularly interested in wearing its philosophy on its sleeve. This is most evident in “Hymn to Collage,” a piece oriented around a spoken word set of instructions on how to collage that is itself a collage of sampled voices.

The instructions give way to driving synthetic notes accompanying an increasingly menacing chant of the instructions: “Take an article, cut it out, and shake it up.” The ending shifts to samples of individual voices defending the status of the work of Art. Although pedantry is not without its charms, especially when it comes in such a nice package, the track it may be a little too on the nose. It’s not as if it would be at all possible to hide the process behind what Bennett does.

The conceit of Bennett’s project is simple: The shifting between the pleasure of familiarity and its interruption. The layers of sound that hover just out of reach of clarity. The wonder of Bennett’s project is how perfectly her mash-ups work, as though she has found the hidden key to a certain history of mid-century pop culture. Her frequent allusions to parallel media histories (there are several prominent references to film on this album, to Jean Marais in Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film Orpheus on “Marais in Mercury” as well as on the track “Camera Obscura”), and her collaborations with other artists including, on Copia, Matmos, Lotte Bowater, and many more, ensure the resonance of her work stretches far beyond the specificity of her samples. (Jennifer Smart)