Largely languid, mellow sounding and alluring indie from the London-raised Chicago-based songwriter Lillie West in her third studio album exploration of persona and presence with experimental textures of voice and instruments. Lead single Diver is perhaps the most pop in style but has a darker humour, exploring the idea searching for new waters and self, but also dragged back “swimming out towards my new life, dragged in by the undertow”. Other standouts include Color of the Pool, Prove It, the inter-layered vocal looping on Photo Photo, and Plates with co-vocalist Death Cab for Cutie’s Benjamin Gibbard, one of several guests on the album including Nnamdi Ogbonnaya, poet Kara Jackson, Ohmme, Adam Schatz of Landlady, Sen Morimoto, Christian Lee Hutson, and Kaina Castillo. Despite the mellowness of sound, West is all about the struggle and an irony here, with releasing some tongue-in-cheek enlightenment videos of other people talking about ‘opening the door’ and for Diver she says “I want total freedom, total possibility, total acceptance. I want to fall in love with the rock,” that rock also being the one continuously pushed uphill in the myth of Sisyphus out of hell. Different, original, and worth several listens. Out on Hardly Art.
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