American indie singer-songwriter Lindsey Jordan returns with a third LP, awash with natural tendency for shoegaze-y melancholy, but also with a warm embrace of jangly and acoustic guitars in this introspective release about time, fading friendships, mortality, the afterlife, and the quiet terror of watching the things you love slip away. Written during a period of intense personal change that included a move to North Carolina from New York, it is doleful and yet also oddly uplifting, and musically there are echoes of the sunnier side of Smashing Pumpkins and the unplugged side of Nirvana. Lyrical inspiration comes from various sources including Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, andthe song Nowhere, for example, draws inspiration from Laura Gilpin’s poem The Two-Headed Calf.
Opener Tractor Beam captures a need to float away, inspired in part by Greg Araki’s 2004 film Mysterious Skin. The video, depicting the emotional undercurrent of the album, was shot on a New Jersey sheep farm and playfully features Jordan gallivanting among a cast of animals, with an eccentric lightness and charm: “Into the night / Endless as it might seem / The future looks so bright / Skyward on a tractor beam.” My Maker also has an acoustic lightness, sprung with escapism and a wry, hopeful energy with the fantasy setting of hanging out at a celestial airport bar: “I wanna fly a plane to Heaven / Tarry at the airport bar / Probably couldn't even get in / I know I’ve gone wrong, let's restart. / Another year gone by/ What if nothing matters?/ Waitin' ’round to die/ To see what happens after/ Battalions of angels/ Marching from on high/ Say, ‘Above us, it's just sky’.”
Lead single Dead End is a a stirringly strummy, grungey-shoegaze number that thinks about past friendships and mourns the simplicity of a suburban adolescence, of parking in a cul-de-sac and smoking together. Butterfly addresses the trapped, displayed beautiful insect and all the emotions it projects. The title track, with cello and violin accompaniment is also beautifully dark: “My renegade, can't stand the way / I just bounce right off ya, ricochet/ Can't let you go, so I rearrange / 'Cause there ain't no dancing around it/ You have changed/ You have changed.” There’s beauty in this contemplative and creative misery, and Reverie has a lovely melody to finish the album, reminiscent of classic Teenage Fanclub. Out on Matador Records.
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