Album of the week with Adrianne Lenker: Like witnessing a therapy session

Highlights: Album of the week with Adrianne Lenker: Like witnessing a therapy session. The self-help craftswoman: No US songwriter has mastered the illusion of folk authenticity more perfectly than Lenker. “Bright Future’s most beautiful songs, also points in the direction of viewing sadness as a gift. Order from Amazon.com from March 29, 2024 2:15 p.m. ET. Indigo Group: 4/Beggars Group / Indigo Group Group.

The self-help craftswoman: No US songwriter has mastered the illusion of folk authenticity more perfectly than Adrianne Lenker: “Bright Future” is our album of the week. And: News from Julia Holter and Jlin.

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Musician Adrianne Lenker

Photo:

Buck Meek

Album of the week:

Some very rare albums are so densely written and composed that you keep clicking the pause button on the first song, then skip back and listen again: What did she just sing? Or just to reflect, to relive the beauty of a tiny song moment that would otherwise have flown by all too fleetingly.

»Bright Future«, the fifth and best solo album to date by US songwriter Adrianne Lenker, is such a marvel. At first it doesn't seem spectacular at all: At first glance, it's just a few gorgeously creaking and jingling folk songs with intimate lyrics that Lenker recorded in a studio with a few close friends somewhere in the woods of New England.

The analog tape hisses, you can hear the movement of fingers on guitar strings, breathing and unfiltered clattering, the occasional note that isn't perfectly hit - as if every song were a one-take, an irretrievably precious live session moment that happened by chance was recorded.

It probably wasn't quite like that, but it's part of the great art of Adrianne Lenker, certainly not an Art Brut hillbilly but a graduate of the Berklee School of Music, to create this kind of felt authenticity in her music. Even though it might just be an illusion. It's one that works again and again and better for her avant-folk band Big Thief. Most recently on the wonderfully improvised, quirky, virtuoso double album “Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You”.

Lenker, 32, is now considered the heiress of Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, although she doesn't see herself as the front woman of Big Thief, but rather as part of an equal collective. She knows karate, likes to sit around the New York diner as a tomboy in an undershirt and a cowboy hat (in photos for the New York Times) and confidently shows off her abundant armpit hair.

The genderfluid musician was previously married to Big Thief guitarist Buck Meek, then was in a relationship with singer Indigo Sparke. Lenker is a free spirit in the sense of a modern late hippiedom, i.e. the perfect alternative poster girl at the moment. The more famous she becomes, the weirder and more introverted her music becomes. This nonchalant self-mystification, which is more commonly known from men like Bonnie Prince Billy, Bill Callahan or Bob Dylan, also contributes to the cult of genius surrounding Lenker and the fascination with which reports are made about her.

But “Bright Future” also offers plenty of reasons to rave. The very first piece, “Real House,” is an autofictional stream of consciousness that only Lenker can currently master: tentatively, crookedly, the music rumbles along to dabbed scenes that she brings to the surface from her childhood, as if one were witnessing a therapy session . Lenker spent her childhood in a Christian sect; her parents traveled around a lot until they eventually settled down and lived in a “real house.”

Lenker describes the confrontation with her first “scary movie” at the age of seven, a doomsday scenario that made her convinced that she did not want to die unprepared. She developed self-empowering, artistically inspiring superhero fantasies to combat the oppressive fear: »I wanted so much for magic to be real, / so many dreams of flying, / rising high over the crowd / and they'd go, ›Oh man, look at her go!' / and I'd go.« In reality, the song is about another early horror experience that apparently traumatizes her to this day - that of her mother's lack of love. “Now thirty-one and I don’t feel strong / and your love is all I want,” she sings. Perhaps a key that opens the entire album in its demonstrative turn towards analogue warmth and musical community. “Sadness as a Gift,” one of the album’s most beautiful songs, also points in this direction: It’s about viewing sadness as a gift.

Adrianne Lenker

Bright future

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Because there is more to these elaborately arranged sketches. About clever word games, for example, like in the delicate fiddle ballad “Evol,” which threads an entire text along anagrams. It's similar with "Donut Seam", which turns out to be a mumbled form of "Don't it seem" in the text and contains laconic warnings about climate change: "Don't it seem like a good time for swimming / before all the water disappears?”. The music sounds a bit like “American Pie”, Don McLean’s farewell to the American (musical) dream.

Improvisation, interpretation, anarchic fun, these are the ingredients from which Lenker forms at least an inkling of her “bright future” as an artist. She and her studio colleagues Nick Hakim, Mat Davidson and Josefin Runsteen transform "Vampire Empire", a pithy rock song by Big Thief that has become a live standard, into a scrappy chicken coop version, similar to that of American late night -Host Jimmy Fallon likes to host events with the Roots, Washboard, partygoers and star guests.

Touching therapeutic lyrics and daring, defiant joy of playing are balanced on this album, which as soon as the last solemn piano sounds and pleadingly sung verses of "Ruined" are over, you want to hear it all over again. Because you suspect that you have missed so many details and subtexts.

(9.0/10)

Listened briefly:

Jlin – “Akoma”

Jerrilynn Patton alias Jlin remains a boundary crosser on her fourth album: The 36-year-old from Indiana is not only one of the most important and innovative representatives of the electronic footwork genre, a complex, hectic house variant from Chicago, she forces it to be made for clubs Beats are always placed in a classical, artistic context. Most recently, she set the dance performance “AutoBIOgraphy” by British choreographer Wayne Gregory to music, and before that she released a multi-layered, Afrofuturistic album “Black Origami,” which was one of the best releases of 2017.

The successor "Akoma" is less exciting, but the guests are spectacular: avant-garde icon Björk refines the opening track "Borealis" with Nordic natural mysticism, the Kronos Quartet harmonizes with the intricate rhythm of "Sodalite" - and none other than old master Philip Glass lends his piano playing to “The Precision of Infinity,” which, despite his demonstrative artistry, is also sweaty to dance to. Exciting! Where does the journey continue for Jlin? Maybe in the direction of slasher film soundtracks like “Summon”.

(8.0/10)

Julia Holter – “Something In The Room She Moves”

The pandemic has left its mark in the strangest of ways. For the US musician Julia Holter, who was an intellectual role model for young songwriters like Weyes Blood in the 1900s, the amount of couch potatoing she was doing, while she was also pregnant, apparently led to her literally dreaming herself into the stucco and furniture of her old home: “When I'm in the furniture,” she flutes in the title track of her new album, “I can intuit stucco.”

The music on “Something In The Room She Moves” sounds elegant, bright and sun-drenched, like the visions of an interior designer dozing off for an afternoon nap. The title is a variation of a line from the Beatles song “Something”. Shimmering, fleetingly dabbed jazz, esoteric chants like “Meyou” and oceanic whale song mediations about the emotional intertwining of grief (the death of her nephew) and maternal happiness (the birth of her daughter) lead to a surprisingly warm and actually intuitive sound ambience. This was not inspired by Greek tragedies or art, as on previous albums, but by gut feeling. Unfortunately, it seems that the otherwise apolitical Holter also turned her head off when she supported the “Strike Germany” boycott call. Luckily, her spiritual Marie Kondo music remains above it all.

(7.5/10)

Chastity Belt – “Live Laugh Love”

It's always great when a band stays together even with moderate success and even gets closer and closer together. Like Chastity Belt, founded in 2010 in the town with the beautiful name of Walla Walla in the US state of Washington. The all-female group has now moved on from ironic-feminist chatter, which over four albums was often about beer, "giant vagina" and nip slips, to greater seriousness. Which doesn't detract from the character of their music, which is based on dream pop and shoegaze.

For the first time, all four members took turns singing and instruments were swapped. The tonalities are correspondingly diversified: "Clumsy" is as crumpled introverted as Elliott Smith once was, "Chemtrails" pumps with the caustic nihilism of Arab Strap, "I-90 Bridge" rolls down the ennui of life like an old Cure song. You shouldn't be fooled by the grimness of the album by the obsessively cheerful skydancer on the cover, nor by the jovial play on the title or the suddenly unleashed pop melodies.

(7.7/10)