Lael Neale – Acquainted with Night
Sub Pop Records – 19 February 2021
Lael Neale was born in Virginia, but her album ‘Acquainted with Night’ is steeped in Los Angeles nostalgia where the singer-songwriter has lived for the last 10 years. The album is a unified whole, and the songs weave together like a tapestry. Nothing sounds out of place or superfluous, and that’s no coincidence. Neale spent years recording albums with other musicians, only to shelve them because they didn’t sound right. She was dreaming of a certain sound, and she found it when she acquired an Omnichord, a sort of electronic autoharp. The sound she had in mind was that of the songs in their simplest, purest form.
Guy Blakeslee, who helped Lael Neale with the accompaniment and the engineering, referred to the concept of ‘lost tapes’ – they wanted to situate the album “out of the context of time”. The idea of the lost tapes sitting in an attic waiting to be discovered reminds me of the found discography of Sibylle Baier and Connie Converse, and the hissing 4-track cassette recorder adds to the vintage feeling that is not devoid of the context of time but, rather, is timeless.
Neale blends old-time influences with the best indie songstresses of today. On her track Every Star Shivers in the Dark, her voice reminds me of Angel Olsen’s gloomy rawness, and much like Olsen’s last album ‘Whole New Mess’, Neale’s ‘Acquainted with Night’ also contemplates solitude. “I might be leaving you/ Because I am a pilgrim too,” Lael Neale sings. In another song, Third Floor Window, she states that “the only stranger is yourself”.
The record deals with other universal themes, like mortality in How Far Is It to the Grave, with lyrics like “How far is it to the end?/ Only a life, dear friend”. But although the themes may seem transcendental, the songwriting still drips with vulnerability. “How the sun reveals herself/ dazed and sure of a distant morning/ I felt the chain upon my skin/ caged inside my ancient longing”, Lael Neale confesses in White Wings. She is like that sun, shining a light on our distant yearnings.
In For No One For Now, though, the mundane shines through, with descriptions of daily activities like making toast and “folding sheets in the bedroom for no one for now”. The droning drum track echoes the pace of life, and how mindlessly we go through the motions. That monotony is broken in the following song Sliding Doors & Warm Summer Roses, where a flute joins the Omnichord, sounding like someone had picked it up for the first time since playing the recorder in high school, and filling the spaces between the words with introspective wonder.
The sparse arrangement of the songs keeps any one song from standing out, and listening to the album feels like driving on a freeway – smooth, unencumbered, effortless. Everything about it is just enough. The songs crackle like electricity on someone’s fingertips, buzzing with a tension that doesn’t break free, but that warms the listener instead.