by Oliver on April 2, 2024 in Album
Almost five and a half years after the magnum opus Aviary Julia Holter tried (with some teething problems) to musically capture and reflect in her work the playful curiosity that she observed in her daughter, who was born during the pandemic.
In order to be able to enjoy this experience as a listener, articulated by Holter in the usual avant-garde song context with free, flowing structures beyond art pop, you first have to listen to the opener Sun Girl to survive, which, with its decisive airy mood and form that tends to meander, still manages to hit the nerve limits. The ethereally catchy refrain (“Sun girl, sun girl/ Sun may, some girl/ Sun maze, some girl“) is ultimately repeated far too much by Holter on the way to becoming a naive children’s song and mutates from the serene harmony of catchiness to strenuous fatigue.
That Sun Girl was said to have been the most difficult thing for Holter to grasp during the recording process and was only tamed at the last minute in one of the jam sessions that characterize the songwriting of the record, one feels like it’s unnerving to hear in this relatively stubborn constraint.
Then it unfolds (which, in terms of the title, makes a nod to George Harrison) Something in the Room She Moves but all the more engaging precisely because of the non-committal way in which ideas, hooks and melodies pass the outer edges of attention in a vague flow with direct impact. A living microcosm flutes and lets brass players indulge in a jazzy environment with fretless bass playing to the teachings of Mark Hollis and takes up the influences of TR Mahalingam and Joe Hisaishi.
There is no sign of the 39 year old Never Rarely Sometimes Always and Karen Dalton: In My Own Time first had to struggle with a latent writer’s block as well as the various adverse circumstances of COVID-19 in order to create, together with co-producer Kenny Gilmore and the participation of Devin Hoff, Chris Speed, Elizabeth Goodfellow, and partner Tashi Wada, an almost typical open arrangement with experimental spontaneity piece of naturalistic trademark Holter avant-garde.
The rest of the initial phase in particular turns out to be outstanding if… These Morning as ambient jazz snoozes as a lounge trance in slow motion, crooning bittersweetly in longing mildness and making the fleeting vein of beauty all the more real, the title song glides across the keys as a soulful contemplation, casually strolling between a cautiously exuberant blossoming in introspection, and the reduced Materia as a lonely miniature as fragile and intimate as an echo of Synecdoche, New York seems.
Following this fabulous run, Holter continues to do Holter things, albeit less sensationally and, despite a certain amount of ostentatiousness, quite subversively functioning.
The mystical chorale Meyou Sounds like Björk had provided the soundtrack to an Ari Aster witch film and Spinning represents a kind of mechanical post-retrofuturism. Ocean follows its title accordingly Blade Runner 2049 as an ambient fairy tale and impressionism Evening Mood celebrates pop on the border between catchiness and illusion, not far from Love is. In the pastoral experiment Talking to the Whisper Holter turns towards the middle with organic improvisation and drifts into jazz with abrasive, cacophonous nuances before Who Brings Me brings a gentle conclusion. A little is Something in the Room She Moves afterwards like a dream, the contents of which you have already forgotten when you wake up, but which leaves behind a pleasant, indefinable and yet so familiar feeling.
Something in the Room She Moves by Julia Holter
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