Following 2023’s acclaimed The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, now an eighth LP of sublime beauty, wit and melancholy and silken vocal tones from the American singer-songwriter, mixing pop, rock, echoes of Laurel Canyon era, and stories and metaphors of love and loss, insecurity, independence and solitude all set at home – and no shortage of cats. Like the last LP, this has very much a live band sound, and her narrator’s persona is a curtain-twitching home bird, feverish with memories, dreams, imagined events and indecision - haunted by stray cats, dogs of dead girls, invasive crowds, selling all her belongings, and fantasising about saving her lover in a lake, as well as ways to die and other what if scenarios. It’s even produced by Patrick Hyland in his home studio, and gorgeously warm in sound. Opener In A Lake leaps in the imagination between a small town and a big city and that metaphorical lake, the small town as claustrophobic, wittily delivered as: “Where you never get away from your first love / It's like one brand of soap's sold in town / ’Cause anyone you can get close to / Smells like your first time around”, while with longing for freedom and space … “in a lake, you can backstroke forever / The sky before you, the dark right behind / And in a big city, you can start over.” The lead single Where’s My Phone?, with more of rolling rock-pop style, captures that dream-like sense of panic and confusion with the lost item. Cats is soft, slow beauty country-ish heartbreak song with those felines as a central image of home comfort and protection (“I won't leave you 'cause I still love you / So it's up to you if you choose to go / In the meantime, sleeping by my side / Our two cats, making sure I'll be alright”). But in the later, percussive, slightly menacing, and paranoid That White Cat, she is over taken not only by him, but lots of other animals, birds and insects, feeling like she is working to feed the ecosystem. “I see him through my window / The white neighbourhood cat marking my house / It's supposed to be my house / But I guess, according to cats, now it's his house.” There’s also a dark hue the slow bass line and scenario of If I Leave, another song with a remorseless inability to make a break from home and her lover, one that builds with an anguish metaphorical dark tunnel of uncertainty in the bridge. I’ll Change For You also hovers on the unknown with an exquisite piano and light percussion accompaniment, Mitski’s voice lingering with long notes on hope for renewed love. Dead Women is another soft gem, and has a ghostly pedal steel and death fantasy scenarios. Gliding from one melody and emotion to another, it’s an eccentric, quietly tortured album of lyrical anguish and insecurity, but filled with deliciously subtle, sensitive delivery and gorgeous crafted melodies. Out on Dead Oceans.
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