Today’s bit of freely-available music is by French musician Marylou Mayniel, aka Oklou, whose fantastic album Choke Enough was one of my best albums of 2025. Earlier in her career, around a decade ago, she put out a number of self-released EPs, one of which, For the Beasts, was a collaboration with Canadian musician Casey Manierka-Quaile. The release notes say that it “includes vocals from Carly Rae Jepsen, Evanescence, Miley Cyrus, Brownstone, Avril Lavigne”, and to say they’ve been subjected to a radical overhaul is to put it mildly.
The title indicates wildness, the artwork peers into the shadows of foliage, prefiguring the darkness with which the EP opens. Though titled ‘Dawn’, the opening track is etched in black, weighed down by heaviness. It’s all the more ironic as the track is a transformation of Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Run Away With Me’, a song all about lightness and speed. Here, as ‘Dawn’, it’s experienced the kind of overhaul that Tori Amos brought to the originals on Strange Little Girls. The music is slowed to a treacly crawl, underpinned by rethought, sluggish harmonies, Jepsen’s voice surrounded and suffused by bursts of light that have the radiance of fireworks, bright but short-lived. It doesn’t so much glow as fizz, yet that itself indicates this is no mere inversion of the original but a heartfelt subversion, cleaving to it, keeping it close, not wanting to release it (“Hold on to me, I never wanna let you go”, Jepsen sings). It’s an astonishing treatment, and while i like the original, i love Oklou’s rethinking of it.
‘Hunt’ is even more transformative, taking a few key lines from Miley Cyrus’s ‘Wrecking Ball’ as the basis for its short, two-minute study. From a muffled opening, as soon the chrous appears, the music opens up, opens out, and becomes transfixed, caught up in radiant reverb, piano arpeggios and resounding bass notes as fragments of lyrics (mainly “I can’t live [without you]”) swirl around.
‘Lurk’ is very much closer aligned to the soundworld of Choke Enough, occupied with dancing synth arpeggios. Floating in the midst of this, appearing and vanishing, is something vocal, stretched out into a slow-moving counterpart to the arpeggios. Only from the midpoint does it start to become discernible, until shortly before the end when it’s revealed as Amy Lee singing a fragment from Evanescence’s ‘Going Under’.
The EP’s expansive epilogue is ‘Everlasting’, a much more ambient-like creation where lyrics are more forthcoming while remaining more elusive than ever. It opens, wonderfully bizarrely, with a quotation from the Big Brother episode when an even more annoying than usual housemate was ordered to remain in silence. From this, a rich, rather stately chord progression cycles, while two phrases of lyrics repeat. Maybe that’s the Brownstone reference (i confess i’m not familiar enough), as it’s followed shortly after by the briefest of snippets from Avril Lavigne’s ‘When You’re Gone’: “Need you there when I cry”. But while it’s a fun game to play, this EP isn’t about archeological detective work, and ‘Everlasting’ in particular is all about the simple beauty of its chords. As the lyric fragments overlap each other, the track sinks into hypnotic ambience, receding halfway to the most simple, gently repeating softness, seemingly continuing forever, until abruptly silenced.
For the Beasts is a fascinating curiosity, displaying much of the same sensitivity and lyricism that Oklou demonstrated to such incredible effect on Choke Enough. Released in December 2017, it’s available as a free download via Bandcamp.
