After the release of her debut album Human Salad,
Gel Set's
Laura Callier moved to L.A. to work as a sound designer. While adjusting to her new home base, her loneliness led her to see oddly familiar-looking strangers wherever she went, and this blurring of the recognizable and the foreign seeps into
Body Copy. While songs such as the taut-yet-lulling "This Is Between" sound like they could've appeared on Human Salad, much of her second album finds
Callier flirting with straightforward electro-pop without losing any of her outsider perspective. If anything, she digs deeper into
Gel Set's layers on these songs, combining fluid emotions and flowing synths with crystal-clear imagery and rigid beats that make the most of her skills as a writer, musician, and sound designer. As on Human Salad,
Callier's shifting personas remain fascinating: She allows some nearly unambiguous romance -- and heartache -- to peek through on "Kiss Me in the Shadow" and "Don't You Miss Me," both of which could be the minimal equivalent of chart-topping hits. She's much more playful on "Odds," where she delivers double entendres about gambling ("I've got these dice/you don't have to be nice/I just wanna roll") with just enough of a wink, and on the excellent "Bounce," where she frames her wobbliness as resilience as she bounces back from romantic disaster. Later, she uses her aloof sensuality for comic effect on "Sex Numerals," on which she goes beyond the obvious punch lines ("62? Hmm… not with you"), and channels an eerie eroticism on the enveloping "Down Along." Elsewhere,
Callier keeps the psychedelic, surreal side of her music going strong on the fantasia of bubbles and bells that is "Puercos" and the fittingly smoky "Cigarette," one of several songs to feature samples and sound effects that she repurposed from an unpaid job. Just as evocative as her earlier work but more coherent,
Body Copy is halfway between bedroom pop and performance art -- and at its best, more dynamic than either.