12/6/2023 0 Comments Cd labelSo even when connection seems impossible, she reaches for company. Her steely, vigilant stance-so prevalent on 2018’s Be the Cowboy and Laurel Hell-has softened, the starch dissolving from her personality. For the first time in a while, she sounds like she has space to breathe.Īs always with Mitski’s albums, loneliness is an inescapable feature of the geography: “It’s just witness-less me,” she sings to empty space on “The Frost,” realizing that she’s alone in her grief. The result is a warmer, quieter, and more organic-sounding record that foregrounds her evocative songwriting. Gone is the claustrophobic synth-pop that landed Mitski her first Billboard hit, the tense sound of the big city now the blinding lights of the stage seem to appear only as a memory. Mitski conjures scenes of stark and spectral beauty, backed by sweeping orchestral arrangements written by Drew Erickson, the man behind the Old Hollywood grandeur of Father John Misty’s Chloë and the Next 20st Century and the cosmic bloom of Weyes Blood’s And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow. Here, the alchemical imagination that turns cumuli into sierras meets fireflies that hurtle like cars and freight trains that clomp like wild cattle. Now “Valentine, Texas” appears like a guidepost along a long, winding road to the wide expanses of her seventh album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We. But after Laurel Hell’s release, Mitski wrestled forward: “I renegotiated my contract with my label, and decided to keep making records,” she announced. It introduced a chilly, fatalistic album that hinted at commercial pop ambition while anticipating the end of her career-a sense of doomed finality reinforced by its title, an Appalachian folk term for rhododendron thickets where wanderers die after getting stuck. These heavy thoughts guided “ Valentine, Texas,” a 2022 song off Laurel Hell on which Mitski cast her inner turmoil onto the natural world: observing clouds that resembled mountains, then visualizing those mountains drifting off, wishing for her burdens to dissipate like vapor.
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