Irma Vep – No Handshake Blues

In Olivier Assayas's 1996 film-within-a-film Irma Vep, the Hong Kong actor Maggie Cheung inhabits its dream-like narrative as if newly arrived from another planet. It's a stirring piece of misdirection: the audience constantly playing catch-up as it struggles to assimilate the dual motives of both fictional and real-life filmmakers.

Edwin Stevens, the Welsh musician and adopted Mancunian, didn't choose his alter-ego lightly. As with much of his distinct aesthetic, and certainly on eleven minute opener A Woman's Work Is Never Done, Stevens is hard to locate; as the track buries itself in a squall of overdriven guitar, Stevens recedes. Cheung was playing herself, of course, but is Stevens?

No Handshake Blues is a disorienting and bruising experience. The brittle guitars fashion a death waltz mode; the vocals are disembodied and pained. Freeform arrangements find little room for melody. On The Moaning Song and the closing Still Sorry, Stevens seemingly expels a lifetime of agonies. Demons are faced down but, as the record fades to silence, you can almost hear them getting ready to return.

Listen to: A Woman's Work Is Never Done, You Know I've Been Ill