With one of the purest voices around, a sublime seventh album by the Japanese-American artist – slow, powerful, dreamy country-flecked pop with orchestra, themed around troubled love and coloured with animal-themed metaphors. It’s a short album of 32 minutes, but its pace, with ballad waltzes and melancholy steel guitar to add a golden line to her superb voice, oozes maturity and a sense of completion, neither too much nor too little, one to soak in full from start to finish. From the gentle acoustic guitar of opener Bug Like An Angel suddenly rising into a vocal chorus of “Family!”, the slow but powerful pace of Buffalo Replaced (“Fireflies zooming through the yard like highway cars”) with its opening wail of a freight train replaces the vibrations of the long-gone stampeding buffalo, and in which the narrator is personified and anthropomorphized into a sleeping creature. The delicious melody and violins of Heaven (“I bend like a willow thinking of you / Like a murmuring brook curving about you”), the delicious self-assurance of My Love Is Mine Is Mine, the delicate melancholy of I’m Your Man with the sound of insects and dogs barking, The Deal, the swelling brass of When Memories Show, all the way to the dark foreboding and melancholy of I Love Me After You, this is a record that in so many ways touches perfection. Recorded at the Bomb Shelter in East Nashville and the Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles, Mitski Miyawaki describes this as her most American album. It’s possibly also her best yet, and is certainly a contender for album of the year. Out on Dead Oceans.
Mitski
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