Brooklyn’s Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek and James Krivchenia return with a beautiful sixth album, joined by guest musicians including Laraaji on zither and percussion, with nine poetic, profound and elevating folk-rock numbers, all with exquisite, bustling, interwoven elegance. Just as with their previous LP, 2022’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, Lenker’s songwriting is up there with the best around, expressing delicate emotions in unconventional structures, melodies springing with sophisticated yet natural charm. On the gently psychedelic krautrock-ish opener Incomprehensible Lenker considers the idea of getting older, even if that is relative - just 33, but looks forward, the song a series of seven verses bookended by two chorus, with lovely images of road travel, photographs, items in boxes and: “My mother and my grandma, my great-grandmother too / Wrinkle like the river, sweeten like the dew / And as silver as the rainbow scales that shimmer purple blue / How can beauty that is living be anything but true? / So let gravity be my sculptor, let the wind do my hair / Let me dance in front of people without a care/ Let me be naked alone with nobody there / With mismatched socks and shoes and stuff stuffed in my underwear.” There’s ideas of intangibility over ways to express to love on the gorgeously rhythmic and interweaving riffs and floating melody of Words. A tale of reconciliation on the tender, slower Los Angeles, (“you're like the Mona Lisa / Smiling in the half-light / Mysteriously, but seriously”. There’s the gently, intimate, erotic and also dreamlike All Day All Night. Or key to a running theme throughout the album the shimmeringly gorgeous title track’s magical love song and philosophical life state of hovering simultaneously between emotions and realities (“At the bridge of two infinities / What’s been lost and what lies waiting”). No Fear’s dreamy, meditational mantra dissolving fear, linear time and place: “There is nowhere / No table, no chair, no country”.
Every track is filled with vivid, wondrously emotional, nuanced fragility, Grandmother to Happy With You, and the warm embrace of closer How Could I Have Known flitting in a simultaneous state of being in in bed with a lover or standing under a rainswept Eiffel Tower, again hovering between different realities and memories: “And they say time's the fourth dimension/ They say everything lives and dies / But our love will live forever / Though today we said goodbye / How could I have known?” Poetry in all its true intangible beauty, captured in a warm embrace of sound. A truly superb album. Out on 4AD.
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