The album's quiet recesses evoke fever pitches of emotional intensity. With “You Will Come Home,” Margolin launches into one of the most searing vocals she's ever captured in the studio. “Come home and take care of the mess I've made,” he pleads to someone he addresses, in true Spencer Krug fashion, only as “Swallow.” She screams raggedly as the song gallops to its end, her voice burning away all the varnish that once clung to its surface.
Opposite cloudsMargolin wrestles with the spectrum of the person she would need to glide smoothly through the world: an inexhaustible performer, a calm and smiling face, a person with solid and tidy emotions that never overwhelm her or anyone else. On “God of Everything Else,” he envisions this duality as a literal second person in one of the album's most mysterious and powerful images: “I wish I was somebody else/I'm begging you to love me back/I look at how she stands/And the way that her hands move/In a mist from you'. Later in the album, he sings, with barbed irony, as if he's already transformed into this upbeat doppelganger. “Nothing makes me sad now/Everything makes me happy,” she wails on “In a Dream I'm a Painting,” sounding like she might either start crying or spit flames.
In the embers of all this rage smolders grief: grief for a love gone asunder. sadness for those dreams of success whose realization did not actually lead to a happy and balanced life. sadness for all the fantastic, idealized people Margolin might have been but couldn't be. “The hard pieces of my heart fall into the hole and tear it apart,” he sings on “A Hole in the Ground.” She refuses calm resolution, refuses to carefully remove her pain. Hers is a world-creating torture: it shatters the real and demands that its strange fragments be forged into unimaginable shapes.
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