Two songs for Adrianne Lenker's Bright future start by washing a settling film machine to its proper speed. Players sometimes mumble to each other as a song begins or ends. Lenker's voice occasionally trails off, as if moving away from the microphone, then rises in volume as she leans forward again. In the first pink, these sonic moments of calibration signal a certain old-school authenticity. The Big Thief singer-songwriter cut her new album straight to tape, like her last, and it has the air of an unadulterated document of the music as it was played in the studio.
Beneath the surface, these effects suggest a more complex relationship between recording and music, drawing attention to the artifice and fate of what we hear. Showing so clearly that this is what the music sounded like This room, upstairs This day, they also imply that it might have sounded very different in another place, another time. The musicians play strange contours of folk rock, paying as much attention to the negative spaces as the notes you actually hear. The aesthetic matches the material. Lenker's songs find beauty in trying to give solid form to memory: to hold it in your palms like a wounded bird that sat still when the others flew away, and coax it with a sweet melody to stick around a little while longer. Bright future it's like an attempt to hold on to the memories of the songs themselves, to stop their wild wings flapping for a moment and take a good look before they vanish into thin air.
Despite featuring her main band, Lenker often approaches her songs with disciplined attention to form and economy, but the open-ended “Real House” is something different. His chords float without clear paths of tension and release. his lyrics are associative rather than linear. In the second verse, a surreal image represents feelings that have yet to be directly confronted: “The stars shine like tears on the face of the night.” Eventually, the song reveals its subject as Lenker's mother, and the fog of ambiguity surrounding the previous lyrics begins to clear. In the last line, a devastating recounting of the first time Lenker saw her cry, we are completely out of the spectral realm and into everyday frustration.
Recorded by Lenker Bright future accompanied by Philip Weinrobe, her engineer and co-producer, as well as singer-songwriter and frequent Big Thief collaborator Mat Davidson, violinist and percussionist Josefin Runsteen and alt-R&B auteur Nick Hakim. They made several passes around instruments: The basic palette of the album is voice, guitar, piano and violin, each of which is credited to at least two different performers at various points. (Runsteen and Lenker's brother Noah also occasionally plays percussion.) The free-flowing and intuitive nature of the sessions is evident in the recordings, which have the friendly looseness of early takes. You get the feeling, sometimes, that they discover the ideal arrangement of a song as they watch it.
