MJ Woodbridge excites our attention because his songs are unique enough to already be their own classics.
We were agonising whether to choose ‘Electr!c Shock’ or epic 80s-like power track ‘To Hell & Back’ to write about, but eventually we opted for the more recent offering.
An oscillating electronica ballad, Woodbridge’s emotion-fused voice clambers over the song like a blowtorch melting a glacier, or molten metal snowing on Venus’ sulphur-fused mountains. Perhaps this is over-egging the soufflé of pretentious music reviews, but I needed to somehow illustrate the difference of Woodbridge’s work.
‘Electr!c Shock’ is sung to a particular person, either a lover or an ex-lover, and carries a tinge of poignancy, light rain on a roof at night. But the lyrics spell a different sense of empowerment. ‘I want to blow your mind, but I know you couldn’t handle me if you tried,’ croons Woodbridge, ‘I’m too much power, too much life, too much spark.’
Then the cascading chorus begins.
‘Watch me – electric shock, shock, shocking / I got you buzz, buzz, buzzin / But I’m too electric for your dick tonight,’ he sings. In an extraordinary feat of marrying tone, words and feeling in a sexually Faustian ménage-a-trois, Woodbridge manages to make ‘I’m too electric for your dick tonight’ sound plaintive and full of soul.
But its core is not just in its lyrics; it’s also technically where this track is exceptional. Not only are the jade-laced layers of sound original and beautifully soldered into twined lattice, clever production makes much of Woodbridge’s emotive voice. Different lines and phrases of the song are echoed and spliced into each other’s vibration, creating an ethereal feel.
We’ve come to expect from the term ‘experimentation’ the likes of Radiohead’s Kid A; an opaque, abstract delve into bleeps and darkness, all too often self-indulgently exploratory or academically alienating, rather than musically involving. MJ Woodbridge manages to experiment in a pure sense, where the life and essence of the music is retained in his play.
And again it pulses a universality to its rendering; whether the lyrics are written for truth or for bravado, I feel there are not many of us who haven’t felt somewhere, at some point, ‘I’m too electric for your dick tonight’ about someone.
