Billy Nomates: Cacti album review — spiky, inventive and introspective

Billy Nomates sounds like a character in a Viz comic strip or a dyed-in-the-mohair-wool punk rocker. She is actually Tor Maries, a Bristol-based singer-songwriter whose stage name points with tongue in cheek to the lonely nature of her trade. She plays most of the instruments on her recordings, whose tracks she programmes and co-produces. She performs alone when she tours.

“Anyone can do it,” she sang in her solo debut, 2020’s Billy Nomates. Its punchy tracks told of dead-end jobs in dead-end towns where boredom and rancour vie for supremacy. There were flashes of Viz-like satire, such as the mocking portrait of male lechery in a song crudely entitled “Fat White Man”. In Maries’ hinterland lay years slogging around the Bristol circuit in bands and a period when she quit music for office work. Punk’s DIY ethos runs through her solo songs, allied to a punk-like snarl. But there is more to her Billy Nomates persona than the spirit of ’77 reincarnated.

Cacti is her second album. Like the plant, it has a spiky, cussed quality, although the music is fuller-sounding and less abrasive than before. “Spite” opens with a fuzzy squall of guitar riffing and proceeds to deliver a brutal slapdown to an antagonist whom Maries curtly refers to as a “little boy”. But after its initial flurry of guitar distortion, the song turns into a driving rock anthem with a nagging hint of Fleetwood Mac, heightened by the mid-Atlantic twang in Maries’ voice.

The lyrics dial down the social commentary and black humour of Billy Nomates. “Balance Is Gone” introduces a theme of psychological struggle. The drudgery of the dead-end jobs in her older songs is replaced by a more introspective type of ennui. “I just go round and round,” she choruses. The title track sets feelings of alienation to a brooding electronic backdrop.

Tough basslines run like a spine through the album, performed by Billy Fuller. The only other accompanist is Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, who plays cymbals on the inventively downcast fairground music of “Roundabout Sadness” (Maries is signed to Barrow’s record label). James Trevascus co-produces with Maries. The songs’ world-weariness is offset by double-tracked singing and decorative touches like the piano and synthesiser vamps in “Same Gun”. The results are nuanced, involving and not at all cartoonish.

★★★★☆

‘Cacti’ is released by Invada Records