‘Halloween’, though, is perhaps the most instructive track defined mainly by a soft, thudding drum and a hushed acoustic, it hides flickers of other ideas in the background – a tiny bit of saxophone here, a fleeting twinkle of piano there, a gossamer-thin vocal from Oberst that arrives only in the dying seconds. Stranger in the Alps was a pretty slight affair musically Punisher is altogether lusher. Elsewhere on the record, more gentle progress like ‘Garden Song’, the gorgeous title track is defined by its lilting, arpeggiated guitar loop, whilst ‘Graceland Too’ pairs softly plucked banjo with fluttering strings and brings in fellow boy geniuses Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus on backing vocals there’s a country bent to it, and it comes off like a particularly mellow nod to Trio, that three-way collaboration between Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris and Linda Rondstadt.Ĭloser ‘I Know the End’ is an epic slow-burner, the instrumental backdrop building to a gallop in tandem with the track’s emotional arc, culminating in a cacophony of drums, brass and a roared group vocal. The early singles set the tone in that respect there’s the tranquil burbling of the reverb that runs under ‘Garden Song’, and the buoyancy of the trumpets on ‘Kyoto’, by far the closest Bridgers has yet come to out-and-out pop. More so than on Stranger in the Alps, a record on which the electric crunch of ‘Motion Sickness’ was the outlier and that was largely characterised by acoustic guitar and tastefully restrained strings, it feels much more as if the medium is the message here. It’s the obvious place to start with Punisher because it involves, if not a wholesale reinvention of the palette, a careful augmentation of it. There’s Bridgers the deliciously wry Twitter shitposter, who increasingly is beginning to sound more like dril than dril (exhibit A, May 1st: “one time my ex challenged my other ex to a fight in the 7-eleven parking lot and I never felt more like a Lady”).Īnd then, there’s Bridgers the musician, often overlooked in discussion of her work, as if somehow the lyrics and their wider meaning have thus far transcended their delivery systems. There’s the Bridgers who’d already proved, in 2018, that she plays well with others with the Boygenius EP. There’s the Bridgers that matched Conor Oberst blow-for-blow on last year’s Better Oblivion Community Center record, which was better than those kinds of crossovers ever tend to be. In 2020, there are myriad versions of Bridgers. Recent collaborations with The 1975 surprised nobody Matty Healy shares her ability to cut to the core of the millennial condition.
This is why, as she releases Punisher, she’s no longer an unknown quantity but, rather, one of her generation’s most prominent solo artists. For those born in the 1990s or later, there’s something deeply relatable in the chronic thrum of nagging, low-level depression that runs through her work, as well as in the softly cynical gallows wit that she’s so adept at countering it with. In the process, Bridgers struck a chord, particularly with the cross-section of her audience her own age.
Here was a new voice finding the poetic in the conversational, approaching storytelling like a particularly wily boxer, reeling in the listener with the seemingly mundane and then landing gut-wrenching haymakers (see “I buried a hatchet, it’s coming up lavender” from ‘Smoke Signals’ or “Jesus Christ, I’m so blue all the time” from ‘Funeral’). Even allowing for the buzz that her Killer EP had generated, she drew Alps on a blank slate, with a precocious emotional literacy that spoke for itself. The 23-year-old who put out Stranger in the Alps in 2017 did so with the benefit of relative anonymity. Three years ago, there was only one Phoebe Bridgers.
0 kommentar(er)
