The Chicago singer and poet moves from 2019’s socio-historical Legacy! Legacy! LP, to a more experimental, soulful album of self-analysis, examining the life cycles of relationships across 17 tracks, in which love evolves and develops like a living cell. She takes in a variety of styles, including in her own vocal sound, from pop to R&B, dance music to jazz and folk, and includes short spoken-word intermissions, such as I Miss All My Exes. The self-analysis is relentless sometimes saccharine and nauseating, sometimes profound. On the slow, soulful opener Bugs, examines the pursuit and pressure to find “the one”. On the more upbeat R&B of Tiny Garden, she chronicles her struggling effort to prove commitment to a relationship. Practice taps into a more positive mood to get things right. The post-breakup Wreckage Room is a deeply melancholy number of delicate rippling piano and guitar that eventually picks up into rousing vocal harmonies. Thermostat certainly hot-and-cold number that shambles between soul, R&B, rock and various disembodied voices. Wolfsheep is a folky number about loving the wrong person. Boomerang is very catchy bouncy pop about waiting for a response and is about “breaking my own rules”. Headfirst, the closing track, with a delicately inviting tick-tock of time and triangle tinkle, sees her coming to terms with herself and all the challenges of love, diving finally into that metaphorical water of human frailty.
Overall, an odd album, meandering melodic, variously ethereal and analytical, stop-and-start tuneful and talky, beautiful but also sometimes challenging on patience and time, the album’s experience, like love itself, certainly captures and brings many kinds of highs and lows. Out on Jagjaguwar.
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