On one of her previous singles “Witchsickness”, Johanna Warren sang of shedding fear and superstition and stepping into true empowerment and liberation. With Chaotic Good she has taken her bravest step forward to date, with an album that has self-reinvention on full display. The quiet-folk of her previous work is a million miles away from this point – a bold statement piece that demonstrates the breadth of her ambition.
Chaotic Good is her fifth full-length album and her first for Wax Nine/Carpark Records and with new single Part Of It, Warren leads you from the quite Arbouretum at the end of the garden up to the house for the party.
Here, Warren flits between crushing admissions set to spare piano solos and muscular declarations of independence that have more in common with grunge acts of bygone years than anything we’ve heard from Warren in the past. “The last few years I’ve had an urge to change my name, or create some alter-ego,” she says. “But I’ve come to realize that ‘Johanna’ is already just a character. We think we know who we are based on what’s already happened, but we’re allowed to make new choices.”
https://soundcloud.com/waxninerecords/02-part-of-it/
Warren decided to produce the album on her own, borrowing recording equipment from a friend to do much of the preliminary tracking alone in a garage. She enlisted a few key collaborators to fully enliven her vision, most notably former Sticklips bandmates Chris St. Hilaire and Jim Bertini. On the raucously resilient “Part of It,” Warren is joined by her musical brethren as she addresses a noncommittal narcissist and—a trademark of Warren’s work—the narrator’s complicity in her own suffering: “Don’t look at me like I’m the one holding you back/and I won’t look at you like you have something I lack.” Adding to the album’s dynamism is the fact that it took shape over the course of four years in studios across the United States while Warren was touring her most recent albums Gemini I and II. Warren uses words like “patchwork” and “scrapbook” to describe Chaotic Good; it is a collection of sonic snapshots that transport her to specific places in time with each listen.
“This album is about learning how to be with myself after a lifetime of codependent relationships,” Warren says. You can hear that especially well on “Twisted,” which finds her confronting a former lover, and ultimately, letting them go. “I’m a warrior, but I give up,” Warren howls, the surrounding production warping and distorting as her raw vocal crests to an acidic scream. Though her lyrics are resigned, her delivery is anything but. It is a moment of total abandon when the multitudinous aspects of a personality coalesce to form something at once dazzling and monstrous. “Chaotic Good is a metamorphosis,” Warren says. “It’s my phoenix moment. Everything I’ve done before was just building the funeral pyre.”
A glorious moment and new beginnings.
Pre-order: https://smarturl.it/johanna_chaoticgood
UK TOUR DATES
17th May – The Hug And Pint – Glasgow, UK
20th May – Pin Ups – London, UK
22nd May – How The Light Gets In Festival – Hay-on-Wye, UK
Photo Credit: Jeff Davenport