FILTER ALBUMS
Kicking Against The Pricks
Bristol-based singer-songwriter’s second album explores the wilderness years.
By Victoria Segal.
Desert music: Tor Maries, AKA Billy Nomates, out on her own.
Billy Nomates
★★★★
CACTI
INVADA. CD/DL/LP
Eddie Wheelan
“I SHOULD not have come/I do not feel OK,” sings Tor Maries over the fairground lurch of her new track Roundabout Sadness, “I brought myself/Brought myself here anyway.” Being in the wrong place at the wrong time is a hallmark of Maries’s work as Billy Nomates: her songs vibrate with unease, uncomfortable in their skin, uncomfortable in the world. It made sense that her early champions Sleaford Mods had her drawl “You’re not from round here”, like a B-movie sheriff, on their bleak 2021 single Mork N Mindy. Maries understands alienation, the unfunny kind that doesn’t come in stripy jumper and braces. That’s not to say she can’t do deadpan comedy: 2020’s self-titled debut included the precariat nine to five of Call In Sick (“If I come in Debbie/I’m going to take down the whole team”) and environmental inactivism song Hippy Elite, outlining the scheduling conflict between saving the planet and holding down a day job. With CACTI, however, the narrative lines are fractured, the satire removed; these songs play out like stress responses, fight-orflight impulses, each one a little panic room.