This visceral, hypersensitive, alternative folk-pop fourth album by the Hampshire-born singer-songwriter digs deep and dark into the psyche through personal crisis and relationship trauma as one of her best to date. This is an album full of sombre but beautiful notes, restless and sometimes musical textures, mostly all instruments played by Hackman, partcularly experimenting with piano and guitars, but particularly sharp, cutting lyrics, lot least on former Song of the Day No Caffeine, a checklist of options in the face of a panic attack, which includes the line “Scream into a bag, try to turn your brain off.” Again as with other artists, there’s particular echo of the style of Elliott Smith, whose gentle yet tragic legacy abides, particularly on the softness of final track The Yellow Mile. This unflinchingly honest album pulls no punches and has a particular leaning towards bodily detail, such as on the powerful Slime, which cries out to “Stranger, I wanna rearrange you / Climb your spine and shake your mind, slide back and feel your bones crack / So sublime, turn to slime.” Vitamins is slow, reflective in sound but also pulls no punches with the droll lyrics as the song restless moves around with scratchy guitar: “Mum says I'm a waste of skin / A sack of shit and oxygen / Empty seed in a can of earth / I'm a fucked up cradle for the afterbirth/ But Dad thinks I could be something/ If I eat my vitamins/ I could be up in a hall of fame / But if we're all special, then we're all the same.” Another standout is the gentle, but no less direct Blood, but the entire album can catch you out at anytime. Coming obviously from much pain over a four-year period, the end result feels cathartic. Out on Chrysalis Records.
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