Adrianne Lenker – Bright Future (2024)    


Review:
Two songs on Adrianne Lenker’s Bright Future begin with the woosh of a tape machine settling into its correct speed. The players sometimes murmur among themselves as a song gets going or winds down; Lenker’s voice occasionally grows distant, as though she were turning away from the mic, then rises in volume as she leans forward again. At first blush, these audible moments of calibration signal a certain old-school authenticity. The Big Thief singer-songwriter cut her new album straight to tape, just like the last one, and it has the air of an unadulterated document of the music as it was performed in the studio.

Beneath the surface, these effects suggest a more complex relationship between the recording and the music, drawing attention to the artifice and happenstance of what we’re hearing. By demonstrating so explicitly that this is how the music sounded in this room, on this day, they’re also implying that it might have sounded quite different in another place, another time. The musicians play wispy outlines of folk rock, giving just as much attention to the negative spaces as the notes you actually hear. The aesthetic suits the material. Lenker’s songs find beauty in the attempt to give memory solid shape: to hold it in one’s palms like a wounded bird that sat still when the others flew away, and coax it with a sweet melody into sticking around a while longer. Bright Future is like an attempt to hold the memories of the songs themselves, to stop their wild wings from beating for a moment and get a good look before they vanish in the air.

For all the shaggy-dog presentation of her main band, Lenker often approaches her songs with disciplined attention to form and economy, but opener “Real House” is something different. Its chords float along without clear paths of tension and release; its lyrics are associative rather than linear. In the second verse, a surreal image stands in for feelings not yet addressed directly: “Stars shine like tears on the night’s face.” Eventually, the song reveals its subject as Lenker’s mother, and the fog of ambiguity around the preceding lyrics begins to clear. By the final lines, a devastating recounting of the first time Lenker saw her cry, we’ve moved wholly out of the spectral realm and into everyday heartbreak.

Lenker recorded Bright Future with accompaniment from Philip Weinrobe, her engineer and co-producer, as well as singer-songwriter and frequent Big Thief collaborator Mat Davidson, violinist and percussionist Josefin Runsteen, and alt-R&B auteur Nick Hakim. They did a lot of passing around instruments: The album’s basic palette is voice, guitar, piano, and violin, each of which is credited to at least two different performers at various points. (Runsteen and Lenker’s brother Noah also play occasional percussion.) The free-flowing and intuitive nature of the sessions is apparent in the recordings, which have the amiable looseness of first takes. You get the sense, sometimes, that they are figuring out a song’s ideal arrangement as they track it.


It is a testament to the sensitivity of Lenker’s collaborators that those arrangements so often mirror the concerns of her writing. “Vampire Empire,” a Big Thief fan favorite, gets an alternate rendition here, and its inclusion emphasizes the notion that these recordings are mere glimpses of particular moments in the lifespan of a song, not definitive final versions. Where “Real House” is airy and dreamlike, befitting the reverie of its lyrics, “Vampire Empire,” about passionate and destructive codependence, is furiously agitated. Most of the tracks on Bright Future give a sense of physical space between the players, but on this one they sound like they’re crowded around a single tinny microphone, sweating on each other as they sing and strum. It feels like the searing early home recordings of the Mountain Goats, except for Runsteen’s bouncy mallet percussion, which provides an odd but welcome undercurrent of whimsy.


Lenker is a prolific songwriter, and her solo albums can sometimes feel like release valves for a creative impulse that’s too big for one band. (Shortly before the release of Bright Future, she surprise-dropped i won’t let go of your hand, a more informal collection of songs whose proceeds benefit the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.) Earlier this year, she hosted a songwriting workshop that encouraged attendees to think in terms of craft rather than divine inspiration, with assignments like writing a story based on someone else’s photograph or copying the form of a John Prine song and filling in your own details. “Evol,” one of Bright Future’s best songs, seems like it could have arisen from one such exercise. It begins, in the grand tradition of Sonic Youth and Future, by recognizing that love backwards sounds kind of like evil. From there, Lenker finds other pairs, with varying degrees of exactness: Part becomes trap, teach becomes cheat.

The formal conceit might seem a little dopey if Lenker hadn’t followed it so doggedly to its ideal conclusion: “Evol,” of course, is about the power of language to deceive even as it claims to clarify, especially over matters of the heart. Lenker is so committed to the bit that you may not realize what she’s doing until you read the lyric sheet, which looks a bit like an e.e. Cummings poem. Here’s one particular doozy, with brackets added for how she pronounces the backwards words: “Speech spells hceeps [keeps]/You say for keeps/To keep me llehs [less]/A shell to speak through.” Intermittently, amid the mind-bending wordplay, she returns to a refrain that couldn’t be plainer: “You have my heart/I want it back.”


The wordplay of “Donut Seam” isn’t quite so sophisticated. The title is a pun, of course, as in “Don’t it seem like a good time for swimming/Before all the water disappears?” Lenker has woven references to ecological collapse into her songs before, but this may be the most overt. The music is wistful and simple, with Lenker strumming big open chords and her chorus of collaborators singing as one voice behind her. As the planet dies, so does a relationship. Lenker looks on at both fondly. At the beginning of the second verse, a new lover comes into her life like a dream come true. A few lines later, she’s on fire, with acid rain falling all around her. From the goofy title, and Lenker’s easygoing delivery, you might conclude that she’s not particularly bothered by this fate. Like the rest of Bright Future, “Donut Seam” shines with a certain acceptance: that everything—love, home, and the songs we write about them—will eventually pass into memory. — by Andy Cush on pitchfork


   


Track List:
01. Real House
02. Sadness As A Gift
03. Fool
04. No Machine
05. Free Treasure
06. Vampire Empire
07. Evol
08. Candleflame
09. Already Lost
10. Cell Phone Says
11. Donut Seam
12. Ruined


Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk
Origin: New York, New York, USA  
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


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