totelegraphandbear which happens to be my critical music writing arm:

Jamie Stewart is the creepiest artist in indie rock. He has always crept the fuck out of me and it is also like he has always known I can be immensely attracted to that. For you see, this is the true power of a creep; the ability to project a sub-sensory innocuousness while incrementally escalating the danger behind a beguiling, but burgeoning, barrier. It is attractive, for it has learned a specific way to attract. It quells one’s fear by replacing it with peculiarity, or with curiousness. Once attracted by it, forever attractive it remains.

Stewart’s magnetism —- um, songs about child rape and suicide, of abuse and cum play, of dangerous families and a searing, self-loathing ugliness —- is entirely based on cloaking the threshold between safety and a darker revelation of duplicity. His songs, rife with teetering keyboards, guitar knives, perspective shifts and pained whimpering, are the sound of the moment when a creep becomes a monster and for all his theatrics, histrionics and self-exposure he remains one of the most enormously riveting listens in indiedom.

So what could a man whose songs are often predicated on examinations of misplaced trust possibly bring to a touchstone of second-decade Female EmPower Pop? Well, as it turns out, very little. In his covers, Stewart has always been able to recontextualize or reinterpret the emotional intention of a track. This is, after all, the man who effectively buried Ian Curtis by reclaiming the interstitial “Ceremony”, sharpening the point of the original into a clanging, raging and bratty reprisal against tormenters. Even his heavily aspirated cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” sounded nothing like a heartland folk narrative and entirely like an iron lung supporting a man in desperate need of affection. In each of these instances the meaning of the song was subverted. But with “Only Girl” the anticipation of Stewart twisting his gender into a submissive and masochistic expression of acute sexualized humiliation, one with no safe-words, never materializes. Sadly, it misses all opportunity to transcend the original and morph into something distinctly Stewart. Instead, we get a rather faithful, even —- gasp! —- fun, rendition of a track which barely elevates itself above a night at Amateur Drag Tuesdays.