On her debut single "Nautilus," Anna Meredith sounded drunk on power and spoiling for a fight. The 2012 cut was the acclaimed Scottish composer's first mainstream release after nearly two decades in the classical world, where her adventurous work often met with sedentary audiences who were polite at best, and openly contemptuous at worst. The track's imperious brass fanfares, artillery-fire percussion, and earth-quaking bass seemed designed to pummel and intimidate listeners. The song was so monstrous in scale that the EP it helmed, Black Prince Fury, and 2013's follow-up Jet Black Raider, trembled a bit in its wake, like going from a Jeff Koons or Louise Bourgeois sculpture to a roomful of sketches.
The track won Meredith the response she was after, but her prospective debut album kept getting put on the back-burner in favor of paid commissions. Almost four years later, Varmints also opens with "Nautilus," and actually lives up to its huge opening gambit. Meredith's electronic work has often drawn from the soundtracks and sci-fi iconography of classic arcade games, and her EPs often stuck within their characteristic limited polyphony. Here, blending synthesizers with acoustic instrumentation, she makes those 8-bit quests and battles feel completely visceral and real, as if you're strapped in her spaceship's sidecar as she goes rampaging around the universe.
Although Meredith wanted to escape the concert hall's stuffier conventions, Varmints still exploits every inch of these rooms' dynamic range, from womping bass and juddering low-end to piercing, starry heights. (It's important to point out that she's not abandoning her day job as a composer.) Her trademark as an arranger is intensely detailed maximalism, but with a keen sense of pop phrasing that keeps things limber, like Max Tundra before her, or Battles circa Mirrored. Matching "Nautilus" for pure muscle is "R-Type," a mass of screaming arpeggios that evokes the do-or-die auto-fire moments of a classic intergalactic shoot'em-up's final level. "The Vapours" is equally bonkers, and sounds like a roomful of overheated machines on the precipice of exploding, while "Shill" thrashes like a herd of angry bull elephants romping in a lake.
Meredith knows the pleasure that can come from pushing a little bit too hard, and the record's few low-key, borderline-ambient instrumentals ("Honeyed Words," the lovely closer "Blackfriars") serve as welcome respites from the madness. Meredith is equally capable of subtler assaults, which she wages with miraculous and exhilarating builds: "Scrimshaw" starts out sounding melancholy and graceful eventually bursts into an unrelenting cosmic endorphin rush. On "Last Rose," Her plaintive, piercing vocals intensify the song's sense of loss. Her crescendos don't always lead to a drop, but she makes you feel the hunger in every one.
