Ramsey is one of the most unique personas in the current indie music scene no doubt. In a world where sex is being discussed and expressed without taboo, often to the point of cheap commercialism, Ramsey is writing about it from perspectives we rarely see, especially in music.
In ‘The Art of Survival’ we witness abuse, paid love, extreme feelings of lust, excitement and numbness. We see a girl who’s dreams get broken by the way she chose to live. ‘He's been paying all night to see me, I'm so lost in the heat of it all, I'm just dying for something to free me’. ‘Red Light’ is following with a heavy bass blackening the atmosphere. We instantly find ourselves in a dark room where a woman is crying out for her dignity being stolen for her dreams to be fulfilled by some promising man: ‘Shame on my desire, look at what you made me do, getting down every night, steal and lie for you’. The story continues with Ramsey chanting in a seductive pain ‘All I wanna do is cash out, get the money, bring it right back to you baby’ as a weak human who almost enjoys being objectified and tortured. Drugs sound like a temporary salvation to this masochistic suffering in ‘Ugly when I’m honest’ with her singing ‘I inhale you, got you conquering my body’. We then see her walking on the stage, ready to dance, serve and offer her body in ‘Bad Bad Bad’ while defending the darkness of her lover in front of the world that does not understand their kind.
I need to make a pause here and say that, If I could visualize this album I would paint tainted blood running through snake-like veins. In the actual cover artwork, Ramsey is drowned in Red Light, giving off this exact sense successfully. Our mind is actually travelling throughout the album in a film-like way while our bodies are sinking in the deep bass and magnetically guilty electronic sounds.
Moving on, in ‘Back In The Dark’ Ramsey is waking up from a 7-track slumber of victimization ‘all of the time i was dying to be somebody i was not, maybe love’s not enough, I give up’ only to slip into it again like an addict with ‘Dark Side’. The track is a step before the peak of her eroticism and sexuality ‘I wanna suck you like a dirty pipe, I like speed in my bowl, they call me lady of the night’. The album peaks and closes with a tribute to the man she calls her owner ‘I belong to you, I give you the power, you’re the only one that I let in, you tear my walls down’. The track is an excellent example of porn in music form. We hear Ramsey’s voice as we would actually experience it during sex.
‘The Art of Survival’ is a tribute to the darkness of night-life experienced by a fallen angel, a woman in love with her abuser, slipping into any kind of extreme in order to feel loved. Even though the world has started to embrace women as fully equal to men, this album reminds us of the filth that dwells behind closed doors. The human degradation in order to feel accepted. All that presented in 9 tracks, in the most cinematic way, raw and painful like a Gaspar Noe film.
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