on the pulse - 2022 - #10 - miranda lambert, let's eat grandma, kelly lee owens, caitlyn smith, lizzy mcalpine, caroline spence, patricia taxxon

This is the sort of episode where I’m doing something a bit different… but I’m not going to tell you what it is. It should be pretty easy to notice if you’re paying attention, but hey, when it comes to stuff like this, you’d be surprised how few will catch on. But enough dropping clues, let’s get On The Pulse!

Patricia Taxxon - Aeroplane - I’m a little surprised my Patrons wanted me to talk about Patricia Taxxon’s newest ambient project; not that I was against it, but given how many of her projects I’ve covered, you eventually start running out of things to say, especially within this subgenre. In this case, it’s less pure ambient music so much as dabbling into progressive house across arguably one of her most expansive and airy mixes to date, where even the blown out, roiling brostep textures, the chirpy, glassy synth flutters she’s had for years, and her more progressive, sharper percussion have a lot of space to breathe and ricochet. A nice surprise for me was how these might be some of the most deceptively catchy melodic grooves she’s assembled since Rainbow Road, especially on the album’s stronger back half, which have a remarkably pleasant buoyancy that gives an album that could feel long a surprising amount of momentum. I do think there’s some percussion pads that feel a little chalky, for lack of better words, or that patter and impact right at the front of the mix and don’t really have depth, but honestly those are minor quibbles all things considered for a project that feels glittery, crisp, and still spacious enough to give the layered melodies some sticking power, probably the most I’ve liked a Patricia Taxxon project since the ballet trilogy in 2020. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel with Taxxon’s work, nor do I think it rises to her best in house or ambient, but I’d argue it’s pretty close to great all the same - check it out!

Caroline Spence - True North - I was late to discussing Caroline Spence in 2019, basically picking up on her sound thanks to her excellent album Mint Condition that has only gotten better with time; it wasn’t a particularly immediate album but that worked to its advantage providing you gave it the time. So I was not about to wait around when she released her follow-up here, and… well, it’s a little tricky to talk about this one. Like with Mint Condition, it’s a slow-burn and can seem like it loses momentum quickly, but if anything it feels even softer and more lethargic, especially by its final third, where despite all of the textured dream country atmospherics it can get kind of sleepy. Granted, it’s just as melodic if not moreso, thanks to the twinkling keyboards that show up on cuts like ‘Mary Oliver’ and ‘Blue Sky Rain’, or the more percussive snarl of ‘Icarus’, but it’s even less immediate and that does place it a step back from Mint Condition… but it also makes sense when you dig into the themes. Like a lot of singer-songwriter acts, Spence is diving into a lot of personal introspection and attempts at self-care in the wake of the past two years, and while the album feels more settled, she’s also more self-aware of how contextualizing it in her art isn’t always healthy either - ‘Mary Oliver’ is one of the best moments here if only because of her frustration in commodifying her pain or implying a resolution when that just doesn’t really happen in reality. What’s more interesting is that even as she’s done the work of repair, it’s a shaky foundation and she’s more aware than anyone that the walls she put up to protect herself aren’t always the most healthy either, with songs like ‘I Know You Know Me’ and ‘Scale These Walls’ pleading for someone to put in the work to get to her. And it’s also clear that her own rougher impulses aren’t gone and she’s still grappling with all of it, from the caution of ‘Clean Getaway’ to the recklessness of ‘Icarus’ where she shoves away the cautionary tale. But for as introspective as this album is, Spence is also aware of how this cascades outside of her, where you get the heartbreak of ‘Blue Sky Rain’, the trudging hope of ‘The Next Good Time’, or finding something close to resolution and self-realization where time and history ceases to matter in the same way on ‘I Forget The Rest’ and ‘There’s Always Room’, which is a really nice sentiment and serves as a great conclusion. That said, there are songs like ‘The Gift’ and ‘Walk The Walk’ that tread really close to self-help cliche, and I’d struggle to say there’s any song here as layered and potent in performance and writing as ‘Wait On The Wine’ or ‘Softball’. Still a beautiful album that’ll fly under the radar for a lot of folks - make the time, check it out!

Lizzy McAlpine - five seconds flat - When the critical acclaim started pouring in for this singer-songwriter in the past month or so, seemingly from out of nowhere, I knew eventually I’d have to investigate… and then I discovered she built a lot of groundswell off of TikTok and seemed relatively well-connected to acts like Jacob Collier, dodie, and FINNEAS, the sort of independent but industry insider’s folk pop artist that seemed well-timed to explode in 2020 only to get overshadowed by Phoebe Bridgers. Kind of a shame, really - you might be able to sketch parallels to the boygenius trio or any slew of very polished bedroom pop acts, but she had good compositional instincts, decent stage presence, and solid writing, so the next step would be to take a leap to help her songs stick out a bit more, play on more than just homespun heartfelt intimacy… and for the most part, it does, and winds up on the cusp of greatness as a result! For starters, this is the first time McAlpine’s theater background really slides into focus, not just in giving her material a little more melodic swell and punch which she often works to great effect, but also in the storytelling in the fractured romances she explores, often with an acute knowledge of how they’re going off the rails or absolutely should end but still feels drawn to the heady rush of them anyway, with a number of guest performers stepping up to play characters in these stories, notably Ben Kessler on the excellent back-and-forth of ‘reckless driver’ and FINNEAS himself on ‘hate to be lame‘. It doesn’t exactly give the album greater flair or the hooks of a project like Charli Adams’ Bullseye, and the writing does not have the emotional weight or detail in the same way Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, or even the most recent Taylor Swift projects do - the closer parallel is probably dodie with a little more self-assuredness, and the fact that there’s so many obvious comparison points doesn’t exactly help this stand out as much as it could, especially ‘chemtrails’ in paralleling certain moments on Punisher - but that doesn’t mean there aren’t great moments here. I love the swelling bombast and melodic changeups of the breakup of ‘doomsday’ and the grand dreams of ‘all my ghosts’, Jacob Collier adds some really nice vocal overdubs on the pulsating build of ‘erase me’ - hell, the vocal arrangements on this album can be legit beautiful, listen to the achingly sad ‘called you again’ against the strings - and the album probably has its most single-ready pop cut with the liquid groove of ‘orange show speedway’ - this album is bookended amazingly well. Hell, most of the lesser cuts I’d probably just brand as a little tepid or generic on the back half of the album, or have wonky synths or percussion that feels a bit stiffer than it should, not outright bad. I won’t call this revolutionary or anything beyond some soft-focus, well-polished pop folk… but it’s nearly great at being that, and is worth hearing.

Caitlyn Smith - High - It seems odd that after Caitlyn Smith landed a one-two winning combination so quickly in pop country that this seemed to not get the same attention. Maybe it’s because it felt more like an EP, with seven songs plus an intro and the title track already being a song she gave to Miley Cyrus, or maybe it’s because Monument Records would rather spend time promoting Walker Hayes instead; Nashville remains as depressingly predictable as always. But after giving it a few listens, I think I might know why this hasn’t attracted the same attention: even if Caitlyn Smith has a huge presence on record that can either make for spectacular melodrama or some stunningly intimate romantic moments, this project doesn’t really play for either. Instead it locks into a lot of likable but not exceptional midtempo relationship songs that Lady Antebellum would have cut a decade ago, where the songs don’t feel as lush with cutting lyrical details or the sheer scale to make the best of Smith’s stunning vocals. Granted, I’m not sure Smith was in the best of position to showcase that scale - she produced this entire project herself and while it’s impressive how warm and well-balanced the guitars and supple grooves are, you definitely get the most rough patches in the vocal pickups, where for someone with her firepower you want a top-of-the-line producer and engineering team. I’d normally blame Monument for all of this, but given how they’ve mismanaged the acts they care about, I’ll give Smith a lot of credit for working what she had - and hell, the regretful ‘Maybe In Another Life’ is a really damn solid attempt to make that gorgeously arranged pop country stunner that’s a clean-up in the vocal production or a live cut away from being among her best! Now if you just take this as an EP, it’s solid and generally likable, if feeling a bit low stakes. But after two albums that underperformed more because of mismanagement on Monument’s part rather than lack of quality, I don’t know if this does what she needs it to do to keep generating traction. So yeah, this is good and worth a quick listen… but it feels like a stopgap, let’s hope there’s more coming.

Kelly Lee Owens - LP.8 - The one thing I stand behind the most when I covered Kelly Lee Owens’ project Inner Song in 2020 is that when you have an approach that’s so tastefully minimalist and monochromatic, it’ll either click on a fundamental level or just fall weirdly flat, and while Inner Song was quite good, it just felt into that very subtle, classy niche where I respected it more than I liked it. So I have no idea why I chose to seek out her follow-up without any prompting - nobody put this on my schedule, I was just curious… and yet this really clicked with me in a way I did not expect! Now it absolutely feels like a swerve from what Kelly Lee Owens delivered on Inner Song: the pop-adjacent melodic hooks are almost entirely gone in favour of the ambient textures and tones that almost seem indebted to misty Celtic folk, which feel more expansive and sprawling and spilling over her ethereal vocals and touches of chimes. And the grooves and melodic sequences feel less rigid and locked in, which allows the quaking bass to feel more shuddering and explosive; seriously, the low-end on this album is so well balanced and has such subtly mixed texture that it has this roiling presence without overpowering the mix, it’s truly striking. Working with noise artist Lasse Marhaug, Owens has described this album as fitting somewhere between Enya and Throbbing Gristle, where it flits across a lingering tension between that rumbling, post-industrial foundation and something yearning and serene - maybe a bit of Dead Can Dance and Objekt too, especially in the glistening, chittering fragments - where the spare lyrics imply how you cannot control that flow of energy… and those who have tried have pushed things off-balance, and that will be corrected, with the last song seeming to imply it’s a message sent from the future to us to do it. Now all of that can make for a weird listen, and I will say the pacing of the project can feel a little askew, especially compared to Inner Song which felt much more focused and self-contained. But there’s a mutated, organic instability and texture to LP.8 that has a lot more character to it, where it holds its balance and atmosphere so effectively while never feeling antiseptic or static, and it really hooked me. If you’re more of a fan of the structure of Inner Song, I can’t promise this’ll work for you, but to me this is Kelly Lee Owens’ most adventurous and interesting project to date, and it’s pretty damn great - check it out!

Let’s Eat Grandma - Two Ribbons - I think it’s fair to say in 2018, I wasn’t effectively prepared to talk about Let’s Eat Grandma. The easy thing to say would be that I just didn’t get it - and while I like it a little more now with time, it still never fully clicked - but I think what I was missing was context and vocabulary: I wasn’t drawing the connections to what hyperpop was materializing as at the time, and I missed the mark trying to put it all together. And while hyperpop remains incredibly hit-and-miss for me, four years later I feel much better equipped to talk about Let’s Eat Grandma… and what we got instead is the sort of accessible, pulsating 80s-inspired synthpop that wouldn’t be far removed from anything Carly Rae Jepsen or AURORA or any number of imitators have done in the past five to seven years! If anything it reminds me of the same pivot that Charli XCX did with Crash earlier this year, move towards a more ‘conventional’ sound texturally to streamline sharper compositional instincts… instincts that didn’t exactly wow me four years ago given this group’s tendency to meander and leads to multiple interludes on a ten song album that don’t really go anywhere, and that’s just as true with Two Ribbons. Don’t get me wrong, on a textural level there’s still an ethereal gloss that fits the gauzy synths, the soft echoing guitars both acoustic and electric, and the husky cooing delivery that all feels soft-focus and well-produced, but I’m not sure the pulsating hooks or melodies are distinctive enough to stand out here amidst the vibes which really lose momentum by the back half. Now I don’t begrudge how difficult this might have been to make given the losses they suffered the past few years, which becomes the emotional undercurrent of the album, and how emotional tension materialized between the duo - probably most obvious on ‘Happy New Year’ where their reconciliation is met with the sound of fireworks, or the coursing guitar driving the release of ‘Watching You Go’ off the chimes, or the buzzy riffs that build and swell across ‘Insect Loop’ which reminds me a little of Future Islands. But maybe it’s how the vocal delivery feels a little muted in selling these emotions, or how the lyricism often leans more heavily on abstraction that doesn’t feel that unique or evocative, or just how certain events on the album feel like they’re occurring out of order, the album winds up feeling incomplete - and while of course that’s part of the point, given that thematically it lands on sweeping questions of what happens after death and how they can fill the absence in their lives, questions they can’t answer, which reminds me a little of Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell which hit a similar thematic arc, the emotional build-up feels off. It almost seems like the duo splitting up was treated with higher dramatic stakes than those losses highlighted on ‘Strange Conversations’ and the title track, but when you root your wide-angle, open-ended conclusion of the album in those losses, the payoff doesn’t match up; yes, there’s a real-life connection implied between both, but it doesn’t translate as well as it could. Hell, they have a song ‘Levitation’ about the mixed results of feeling detached from reality, a sense of dizzy confusion later mirrored to better effect on ‘Hall Of Mirrors’ with its odd horn solo, and on some level that serves as metatext to my emotional experience with this album. Not saying this is bad - it’s well-produced, there’s a tightness and gloss to its best moments that’s impressive, and I respect the connections it was trying to create. I just feel I was held at arm’s length from really threading those tenuous connections - a good album, not a great one.

Miranda Lambert - Palomino - This is going to sound a little weird, but I’ll say it: I think Miranda Lambert has felt a little adrift for a while. And this is not a critique so much as an observation, there’s been a searching quality in her music that has led projects to feel scattered or sprawling, sometimes to great effect like The Weight In These Wings or the healing she seemed to find on that last Pistol Annies album in 2018, sometimes to disappointment such as 2019’s Wildcard where she swapped in her longtime producer for Jay Joyce and it didn’t really work. But hey, she had that niche project with Jack Ingram called The Marfa Tapes that was pretty solid and some of her collaborators from that collaborated on this, even rerecording songs like ‘In His Arms’, ‘Geraldine’ and ‘Waxahachie’ to create what some have described as something of a vintage travelogue. And… I mean, it’s not like this is unfamiliar territory for Miranda Lambert, she’s written material in this lane before, but while this is a better album than Wildcard on production alone, it doesn’t quite grip me like Miranda Lambert at her peak and I think I’ve pinpointed why: intensity and stakes. Lambert is the sort of performer who can sell weighty scenes and emotions, push things to the brink where many won’t go, but Palomino is not aiming for that height of drama: it’s looser, it’s more relaxed, consistently warm in its guitar textures and generally well-balanced in the low-end to a fault so there’s little in the way of obvious duds, but also not much in the way of standouts that really grabbed me in terms of lyrical flair or punch, especially as Lambert has included a lot of songs like this scattered across her career, both solo and with the Pistol Annies. Yeah, there are songs that feel more fractured, like the jittery ‘Actin’ Up’, the lumbering ‘I’ll Be Lovin’ You’, or the kooky B-52s collab ‘Music City Queen’ that feels more like a gimmick, as does the overproduced ‘Country Money’ that feels like something Jenny Tolman delivered way better earlier this year - it plays better when we get the Mick Jagger cover ‘Wandering Spirit’ which Lambert delivers well. But more often than not there’s an odd feeling of detachment with a lot of these tunes, not that Lambert is in cruise control but that it’s almost routine, a little two-dimensional in painting with detail but without much greater emotional depth or revealing more of Lambert herself. At its best, we get songs like ‘Tourist’ and ‘That’s What Makes The Jukebox Play’, where there’s a tangible distance and loneliness that gives Lambert’s detachment pick up emotional weight, and ‘Carousel’ is a really striking dream country closer where Lambert tells the story of a woman retiring from a circus where the perspective shifts and you realize her detachment might be signaling wistful dreams of her own. But at its worst we can’t get away from the weirdly impersonal pileups of colloquial cliches that ran through Wildcard now on songs like ‘Strange’, and I can’t be the only one who hears ‘In His Arms’ and ‘Waxahachie’ and wonders why two of the best songs on this album were imported from an earlier project - that’s telling on a drifting album that already has momentum problems. Again, this is far from a bad project - as a whole, I think this is mostly solid - but if Miranda Lambert needs to step away, recharge her batteries, find more inspiration to come back with fire to get back to her best, I wouldn’t complain either.