CREASES REVIEW: Beats Per Minute, by Rob Hakimian

Roma Orme is a Kent, England based multi-instrumentalist, producer and songwriter who released the excellently named debut album The Poster Girl of Impossibility in 2019. Now she’s building up to the release of a new EP called No One Can Tell Us Who To Love next month, which she says “gets up close and personal, like saying to a stranger do you mind if I ask you a personal question, then just asking it without waiting for the answer.”
Evidently Orme’s sense of drama is still very much intact. Today she’s shared the EP’s opener, “Creases”, and it makes good on her quite provocative description. Underpinned by cinematic stabs of piano and bass, while her voice is wreathed in webs of classical guitar, “Creases” positions Orme as a spooky femme fatale in the midst of a candlelit courtship, being pulled “deep into your creases”. The attraction she feels is utterly intoxicating, and she transmits it to the listener through her ripe singing and imagistic lyrics. One minute they’re making noise in the library, then the court room, the next they’re whipping each other with a cat o’ nine tails – “lash by lash / we get so close so fast,” she sings suggestively. From there, she extrapolates briefly into a dream of a liberal world where everyone can express their deepest desires without any sense of shame. Even for those of us who have never really been tempted by this kind of brutal sexual interaction, Roma Orme makes it sound utterly divine here.

Creases

Roma Orme’s first EP, No One Can Tell Us Who To Love, — gets up close and personal, like saying to a stranger do you mind if I ask you a personal question, then just asking it without waiting for the answer. Dallying somewhere between folk, trip hop, and electro, there’s an airy vertigo to Roma’s music that makes sound unlike anything else.

Sepia Ghosts

No One Can Tell Us Who To Love

Marianne Said

05 Pleasure Call

04 At The Mercy Of A Thin Rope

A clumsy lover who needs a pair of Moon Gloves

03 Moon Gloves

02 The Poster Girl Of Impossibility

The quest for a genius lover when Mensa meets Match.com

01 G For Genius

A track born in lockdown: In these times of a new touchless status quo, Roma raises the question: When can I touch you again? Observing that our skin hunger has left us feeling an aching hollowness. We have become air huggers, missing out on the delicious oxytocin effects of human contact. She makes a heartfelt plea, when all this is over, can we touch more often and hold on more tightly.

Hands Left Lusting

HANDS LEFT LUSTING

In the lyrical style of the Blues, Roma literally ‘Woke up one morning’ four years ago and started singing her ‘dead’ poems to bring them to life. Later fusing them with her unusual compositions. She describes herself as an accidental astronaut, as it feels out of this world to be making music, and wonders if she’ll be measured for a space suit sometime soon. She has a debut album under her space belt, and an EP that just hit the stratosphere, all recorded in her modest home studio on her houseboat, the same boat that once supplied Radio Caroline.

ROMA ORME