Bright Future
by Adrianne Lenker
This unusual, engrossing album was recorded in a backwoods studio, and that ambience complements these stark songs. On the opener, Real House, Lenker – of New York’s experimental alt-folk outfit Big Thief – weaves a six-minute reminiscence over rickety piano, sometimes going off-mike.
Its unvarnished quality suggests she’s creating it in real time and we’re eavesdropping on a conversation: “Do you remember/Coming to the hospital when I was 14? My friends all left me there spinning/Dad was angry and you saw everything …”
That her recollection reaches no convenient closure only adds to the mystique, and Bright Future captures that kind of crafted spontaneity.
Sadness as a Gift opens with a count-in and has the quality of a gorgeous early Dylan ballad, as rendered during his upstate retreat: “Leaning on the windowsill/You could write me someday and I bet you will”.
Like Dylan, Lenker spent formative years in Minnesota, and her folk origins come through on the gentle acoustic, emotionally direct No Machine (“Don’t know where I’d go without you”) and Free Treasure: “We lay around for hours, talk about childhood pain/Mom and Dad and past lives too, I can tell you anything”.
However, there’s urgency in her first draft of Big Thief’s clanking, Dylan-1966-adjacent single Vampire Empire, which gets a rapid-fire delivery.
Lenker and friends (on violin, guitar, old piano and percussion) here keep the focus tight, even when an arrangement gets wonky, as on the quirky Fool.
But much of Bright Future has a sadness and caution about it: Candleflame might be a cousin of Jackson C Frank’s despondent realism of Blues Run the Game, and Already Lost wears its sentiment in the title.
Ruined at the end is a resigned confessional where sexual passion defeats self preservation in the dark basement where the lyric is located.
Bright Future – which offers a different, very personal take on weird Americana – is an album of emotional exposure, folk imagery, lessons learnt and ecological pessimism (Donut Seam). But also a place where there’s comfort and a lilac river.
Rooting For Love
by Laetitia Sadier
Mostly known for her central role in Britain’s wide-reaching alternative band Stereolab, French-born singer and multi-instrumentalist Sadier has enjoyed a diverse solo career and interesting collaborations with the likes of San Francisco’s Deerhoof and the Brazilian band Mombojó (as Modern Cosmology).
For this fifth solo album, she embraces nuanced art-pop (Protéïformunité), borrowings from minimalism (the repeated substructures of the expansive Panser L’inacceptable and La Nageuse Nue), subtle electronica, the layered backing vocals from The Choir ensemble (notably on the refined The Inner Smile) and the lighter end of the French yé-yé pop tradition (Une Autre Attente, The Dash).
It makes for a melodically rich palette of electronic music with reference points in Laurie Anderson (Cloud 6), Meredith Monk’s hypnotic vocal arrangements (Who + What) and – on songs like the psychedelic pop of Don’t Forget You’re Mine – an attention to the intricate details of arranging that Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys once commanded. Beguiling.
These albums are available digitally, on CD and vinyl.
