Adrianne Lenker – abysskiss
Saddle Creek – 5 October 2018
Autumnal winds bristle with melancholy, dying leaves painting the ground, summer’s bloom a fallen memory, winter’s chill seeping through, time ticking round, the world going on and on. In his 2008 book The World Goes On, Hungarian writer László Krasnahorkai writes that melancholy takes three hues; one of a futility without cause, a realisation that nothing truly exists beyond us; a second of aesthetic tone, a musical chord shifting from major to minor; the third drawn out from love and all its ramifications. The third is the most obvious and least meriting of urgent discussion within Krasnahorkai’s dense musings.
Within the same northern hemisphere but in distant Indiana, Adrianne Lenker’s second LP abysskiss was released as leaves began to properly fall from their summer heights, temperatures beginning their descent in earnest. Listening in London, it sounds as if it was made for just the same autumnal moment as my time of writing. Further, it sounds as though it was created quickly out of a particular creative moment, so focused is its atmosphere, coated in gently forlorn colours. Indeed, according to Pitchfork, the album was recorded within a week.
As a fellow songwriter, I know of enchanting creative modes from which pieces in whole are forcibly put together in quick dashes, the mind’s eye arrested with an absolute clarity of imagination. While some songs or collections can be painstakingly crafted over months and years, other times a series of songs or artworks come spontaneously, borne out of a particular and inescapable sensitivity. abysskiss feels as though it comes from this latter mode, drawing you into a specific intimacy, a preservation of a particular sensing of some truth or feeling in its most incipient form, not yet transformed by meticulous contemplation.
That it bears resemblance to her more elaborated songwriting in her band Big Thief, but at the same time comes across as stripped back and humble, is unsurprising. Certain sonic details such as the focus on a singular driving guitar hook on blue-red horses for the use of rackety background noises on from could come straight from Big Thief’s sophomore release Capacity. Yet with Lenker’s songwriting laid most bare, a particular tender melancholy strikes out with greater clarity, delving in various hues of futility, subdued intimacies and troubled memories through ten gently deathly and focussed lullabies.
She positions herself as the most softly spoken sage, her whispery yet gently strained vocals merging darker regretting brushes with classic folky tropes of nature and not-yet-forgotten childhood. On terminal paradise,over swaying fingerpicking guitar that lilts over a continually dissipating piano, she mournfully sings, ‘screaming in the field where I was born’, where she’ll be our ‘bird’, we’ll see her ‘death become a trail’, a ‘trail that becomes a flower’ – an imbuing of death with life that is inherently seasonal. Through to the closing lyrics on 10 miles – where ‘nothing Is real, we still have that feel, you’re closing up the bar, I’m warming up the car’ – each track draws on residues of memories and emotions blowing in the wind as life continues its various endless cycles, with characters passing through, lullabies continually soothing inevitable dissipation. It should be noted that none of the songs end with an obvious sense of resolution.
The album’s strongest standalone tracks come in the middle, as the LP slowly builds its own sort of momentum between the lo-fi Elliot Smith sounding ‘out of your mind’ and ‘blue-red horses’. In between, ‘cradle’ has a gorgeous serenity that recalls Julie Byrne’s 2017 release Not Even Happiness, while ‘symbol’ has a compelling rotating guitar riff over a lightly growing gentle background thud that conjures a continually enveloping infectiousness – a track that begs repeating.
The album fades a little in its final third, with the title song and ‘what can you say’ sounding like more classical folk songwriter fare, but then this perhaps works in its own way as well. The album never looks to build to a particular point, instead carrying you softly through Lenker’s world before fading back into humdrum reality.
On closing track 10 miles a ghostly synth slowly grows, and the world around gradually restores itself as the LP fades to its end, and you’re left returning to your own autumnal world, briefly charmed by Lenker’s clarity of melancholy.
https://www.adriannelenker.com