Home
Bright Future
Barnes and Noble
Bright Future
Current price: $17.99
Barnes and Noble
Bright Future
Current price: $17.99
Size: CD
Loading Inventory...
*Product information may vary - to confirm product availability, pricing, shipping and return information please contact Barnes and Noble
Arriving two years after her band
's Top 40 breakthrough,
,
finds a solo
delving into a wide range of topics -- love, climate change, gratitude, overwhelm -- with her trademark intimate spin. While her previous solo outing,
, was recorded alone with engineer
(who returns to co-produce here),
decided to expand her palette for
while limiting it to mainly acoustic guitar, piano, and violin. To that end, she gathered with friends
(piano, voice),
(violin, voice), and
alum
(guitars, piano, violin, voice) at Double Infinity, a remote analog studio in the New England woods. There, they recorded songs ranging from spare tracks to the semi-lively singalong "Sadness as a Gift," quirky electric-guitar song "Fool," howling acoustic jam "Vampire Empire" (a song previously recorded by
), and campfire climate-catastrophe ditty "Donut Stream," which warmly reasons, "This whole world is dyin'/Don't it seem like a good time for swimmin'/Before all the water disappears?" To set the stage, though,
opens the album with "Real House," a hushed tearjerker of a walk down memory lane that remembers things like wanting to be an inventor, the first time she saw her mother cry, and contemplating "dying unprepared" after watching a scary film when she was seven. A showstopper at track one, it's essentially an a cappella performance, with a fragile-voiced, lilting
backed only by minimal piano chords and rare flecks of violin. The album is bookended by "Real House" and "Ruined," which leaves listeners on a similarly touching note. Nearly as whisper-quiet as the opener, it's a solo performance consisting of voice ("Can't get enough of you/You come around I'm ruined"), piano, and touches of mystical crystal. An arguable highlight among highlights along the way is the tender "Evol," one of
's "list songs" that, in this instance, plays with reversed words (teach, cheat; part, trap; kiss, sick; etc.). Having said that,
is the type of no-filler album with enough variety and poignancy that each song is bound to be somebody's favorite. ~ Marcy Donelson