album review: 'songs' by adrianne lenker (8th year anniversary)

So, looking back on my anniversary reviews, what I find amusing is for the most part, they don’t attract that much attention outside of my audience, which is why most of you tend to know what I like to cover and outside of the 2017 anniversary review for Stoney, most of you don’t try to troll me, which I appreciate. And thus for this year it seemed like it was going to be a horse race between KSI, Adrienne Lenker, and the Koreatown Oddity…and then the GFRIEND k-pop fanbase found my post. I can only assume that’s why within a period of a few hours I found a swell of fans all requesting the same EP in numbers that dwarfed any other request. Now there was a part of me that was inclined to just veto this, but honestly this was on me - I probably need to consider a more secure way to structure this survey so it doesn’t get hijacked, I was genuinely assuming I’d only have to deal one rabid k-pop fanbase this past week!

That being said, I wasn’t against covering the act in principle and before the fans showed up this was an act that got some votes, so there was interest here… only for me to discover that the band disbanded just over a month ago, and I have to be honest, it doesn’t feel right to make a review for an EP of a k-pop band that’s no longer active, especially when I have to compare them to the other acts on my docket that didn’t get mass-voted and are probably more representative of what my fanbase wants to hear me talk about, which is the purpose of these reviews. And as such, going down to the wire here…

Well, now the conversation gets a bit messy, because this is one of those artists for whom I’ve heard about a great deal and I watched all the critical acclaim come in for her band, but I’ve been at a distance for some time… because I’m not a Big Thief fan. Like most people I became aware of them courtesy of their two critically acclaimed projects in 2019, when they got signed to 4AD and got a promotional budget and suddenly all the publications knew and loved them. And while I mostly respected their breathy, ramshackle brand of indie folk rock, for the most part I was not enraptured by their writing or performances or mixing or melodies or really any of the songs. I mean, it was fine for what it was, the sort of soft-focus indie material that can feel dime a dozen if you spend any time on Bandcamp but is such obvious critic bait for a certain audience it’s ridiculous, but I know I’m rarely in that audience, and in my experience with singer-songwriter material if I’m not gripped by the vocals or the poetry, odds are it will not stick for me. And given that the act we’re talking about today was the lead vocalist and songwriter of Big Thief, that’s why I stayed away from covering Adrianne Lenker’s solo work last year - figured it was for the best. Now I went back and checked out her solo albums and… well, you can definitely hear a more youthful and exuberant prototype of what she’d make in Big Thief, and if you’re into the brand of very stripped back, intimate acoustic folk and you like her voice, you’d probably like it? But apparently it was this project that properly put her over the top, the sort of simple but undeniable indie folk that was transcendent in its direct potency, this is the one that would make a believer… so how is it?

…you ever get just that sinking feeling in your gut when you find a piece of art and you get the appeal, you understand how and why it works… but it doesn’t really work for you, and that you just know you’re going to wind up in the minority opinion because of it? Yeah, hate to be the letdown here, but with every listen I gave songs, the more I get why some critics and audiences adore it… but once again I find myself at a distance, where I can certainly say it’s pretty and reasonably well-composed and the poetry has its moments, but it doesn’t move me, and I can’t fake that it does.

And while I just know this review will go long, at the very core it’s the same issue I’ve had with Lenker since the beginning and some of it is just this simple as it has to be when the arrangements are this stripped down: I don’t care for her vocals at all. And it’s no one major thing I dislike: she’s not a great technical singer but for this brand of winsome indie folk she doesn’t have to be, the charm comes in the vibe and intimacy, the soft focus cottagecore presentation where even though she wrote this in the lockdown of last year, there is something timeless about her trilling, tentative delivery. But I’m reminded a lot of when I talked about A Crow Looked At Me by Mount Eerie four years ago where I got the emotional depth and heartbreak he was experiencing where it was intended to be so stripped back and intimate its reality became too much to bear… but if you cannot emotionally connect to that intimacy, you wind up awkward on the outside looking in, and that’s the same feeling I have here! There are other factors - I don’t get that magnetic pull of subtle charisma that some pick up on, the near-baby voiced cooing is not a vocal timbre that tends to work for me, there’s a very pronounced twee side to her presentation that we’ll talk about more with the writing but is also something I’ve never liked, especially when coming out of the early 2010s the millennial folk scene got commercialized and drove it all into the ground, but it goes deeper…

And it touches on something I’ve said before: pure acoustic folk singer-songwriter stuff doesn’t often have the flavour to stick for me; I tend to gravitate to the material that has a texture that’s more country or rock, or has a Celtic undercurrent in the compositions, or even pulls from a well of soul or R&B or blues. Lenker, meanwhile, is playing to form straight down the middle, with the sort of layered, cyclical compositions that clearly show someone with a lot of talent and a meticulous eye for detail… studied almost to a fault, where when I discovered she went to Berklee my response was ‘of course she did, I can hear it’. And once I heard it, it kind of puts a hole in the atmosphere, where you realize just how much of the intimacy feels constructed - of course there’s birdsong and touches of rain and wind chimes and you can hear fragments of the recording process and touches of tape reel and so much creaking acoustic texture, that’s what you do when you’re trying to create that feel of intimacy in the same way you might hear the vinyl crackle for an album trying to sound retro. Maybe it wouldn’t feel so obvious if the album varied itself more - this is a project that drops into the spare midtempo vibe and only barely shifts within it - but for a project that needs that organic, intimate, serious atmosphere to work, if it feels compromised it’ll take you out of the experience - and when I say that, it mostly just fades into the background, less bad than just inoffensive. So I thought, ‘okay, maybe she’s going for a more constructed approach, more of a parallel to Joanna Newsom, there are some vocal similarities and a similar studied feel to the compositions’… but no, Newsom is way more expressive and theatrical and fae, this is not aiming for that, it’s going for a broader universality in working the pure refinement of the composition. this is the same stuff I praise Jason Eady for and he’s not a strong vocalist either - in fact, that’s a parallel that makes a lot of sense! But if anything it makes my point: Eady absolutely relies on the same intimacy and purity of presentation, but there’s a blunt rawness that comes with country that cuts through not just his writing on the self-titled or Daylight & Dark, but the rougher edges of his presentation, where it feels lived in and organic in a way that for Lenker’s folk it feels constructed… but she wants to present it all as organic, and to be honest it doesn’t always feel like it is.

The other point is that in these compositions, the hooks are treated with casual disinterest. Oh, they’re there - sometimes - and at their best moments there’s a warm, borderline hypnotic quality to a few of them that does remind me a little of Kurt Vile or Neil Young, the latter of whom Lenker cited as an influence and I can hear it, especially in her uniformly excellent guitarwork. For instance, I like the methodical, slightly quicker cadence across minor chords on ‘ingydar’, the supple touches of gentle atmosphere that lets ‘anything’ come to life that also slip into the shuffling warmth of ‘dragon eyes’, the slightly more immediate but no less layered ‘heavy focus’, and the more structured but playfully rambling composition of ‘zombie girl’. But it immediately puts me in the mind of the Bandcamp conversation I mentioned earlier, where a stigma I will throw on a lot of material on that platform is that they can be a little short on immediacy or melodic hooks, which of course you don’t need to have especially for this brand of intimate acoustic folk… but it helps it stick out, it’s one of those things you wouldn’t complain about if they were there! It was an issue I had with Big Thief too and it’s reminiscent of a problem you can occasionally see with musicians who come from a more technical background, where the disinterest in writing a tune that’ll stick with you is palpable - it’s just as prevalent in progressive metal as it is in indie folk, and it reflects a lack of populism that doesn’t help cultivate that intimacy. It’s one reason why it’s difficult to pick out real standout cuts here, and why this album goes into the background so quickly for me - sure, it’s pretty, it’s well-arranged, the warmth is certainly there, but without the modulation it just washes over me, and I wonder how distinct it really is from the field and if more Bandcamp acts could use 4AD’s marketing budget.

But for any folk singer-songwriter, especially one that’s leaning on stripped back intimacy, the conversation has to ultimately come down to the writing, the make-or-break moment… and again, it’s one of those cases where I think I get it, but I’m just not nearly as impressed as it seems everyone is. Admittedly some of this is personal preference - if you’re going to strip it all down, especially with the breakup with her girlfriend heavily on her mind, I normally prefer the poetry to pick up some rawness or intensity as well, but Lenker tends to weave around the points she wants to make and the diffuse structure of any sort of arc or storytelling on the album can make it tough to grasp on the first few listens. Granted, some of this is my own aversion to a brand of poetry that tends to be more twee - focusing on metaphors and symbolism rooted in idyllic nature scenes, with a few moments that are trying to seem more edgy like the shotgun reference on ‘anything’ and the dreams of ‘zombie girl’ but don’t really follow through, it’s done in order to make the scenes seem more homespun but more often than not it dampens intensity. And that’s kind of a shame because if you drill a little deeper, there are some heavy and interesting scenes going on, mostly surrounding themes of space and separating, partially tied into her breakup but also expanding to a much broader tableau - gee, you can almost tell this was written during a period of pandemic isolation or something. But that’s also reflected in a considerable amount of death on the album, which Lenker most often frames as a natural consequence in the cycle of life, leaning really heavily into the balanced synergy of life and death and how even despite the vast, infinite gulf between them, be it by time’s passage or just in concept itself, there’s a connection there that persists. And I do like how as much there are moments where the abstract metaphors feels bigger like on ‘forwards beckon rebound’ or on the chorus of ‘not a lot just forever’ or even the near-death experience of ‘my angel’ and you can tell they’re really just wide angle extrapolations of a former relationship still on her mind where she clearly recognizes where she was probing and pushing it, but still needs that dualistic experience. Hell, even on ‘zombie girl’ she’s initially frightened of that darker force, but then they wind up in bed together and she finds herself trying to discover more.

Now I could be crass and say this album feels codependent as all hell - which of course she realizes but can start feeling cloying the more she repeats upon this territory - but to be fair there are moments that pick up some pathos. There is something very human about how Lenker feels she must test and prod any connection, even with the dogs that snap against the intrusion - ‘heavy focus’ is a good exploration of it too - but also desperately seeks to cling to it, a balanced and distinctively feminine paradigm worked out effectively on ‘not a lot, just forever’, and I appreciate on ‘half return’ how when she goes back home, she can’t recapture that childhood picture - she’s trying to build a parallel of angst across the years, but it’s not one that can coalesce. And I like the abrupt ending on ‘my angel’ where being caught in that tension between life and death can feel so sudden, especially coming after her most direct love song on the album with ‘dragon eyes’; her writing can do some really interesting things with tension and a fascination with infinities, you’d think her arrangements would reflect the scope beyond cyclical guitar patterns, even if her point would be that capturing those smallest moments can still feel eternal. But then there’s ‘come’ - I appreciate the peace that it’s trying to convey to someone older who is passing on, in this case directed at her producer’s grandmother… but not only does it feel a little out of place for as dualistic as this album’s themes can be, when you realize it’s in the context of the pandemic it feels placid in a way it shouldn’t. It’s a naturalistic approach taken to a societal calamity that was anything but, especially last year, and then you realize the factors that allow Lenker to take that tone, where the most pervasive angst is isolation, and suddenly that organic intimacy breaks all over again.

But here’s the thing: as a balm in the time and place, in late October of 2020, I get the respite an album like this might provide. It allows an escape into something winsome and reflective, as a lot of the more relaxed works released in the past eighteen months have, and it has me wonder if I’m asking questions of how reflective the vibe is even now, that has wondering how this album will age. Because that’s the thing: as much as this album’s stripped back approach plays for timelessness in the universality of its intimacy, there are a lot of moments that make it feel so much of its time and it really mutes that impact for me, be it from the writing to the vocal delivery which is very contemporary to a specific scene and era. And I think that goes beyond ‘it’s just not for me’, even if that’s true, because while I don’t think this is a bad album by any means, I think its appeal is more limited than it might seem, and while there is depth, I’m not sure it’s consistently flattered in the ways it could be, especially when it is considerably more by-the-numbers than many proclaim and compositionally it just doesn’t stick out much for me. And for me… solid 6/10, and I hope given this lengthy explanation you get where I come from with this - nothing I say can take away the calm and peace it may have given you last year, but when it comes to songs… there’s just others I like more.