For all of the neatly positioned, lyrical delicacy and an image that’s been crafted to portray raw and visceral sorrow, Baker’s sophomore album Turn Out the Lights has a bountiful of fight buried within, clawing its way to the surface.
Whether hopeful or wallowing, Turn Out The Lights is beautifully crafted throughout, full of the kinds of songs that linger long after they’ve ended.
Turn Out the Lights is an immense record that runs a gamut of emotions, from distress to love, anguish to healing. These are songs that you feel more than listen to. Everyone has encountered some sort of mental illness, addiction or crisis of faith, whether in your life or another’s. Not only does Baker prove that you’re not alone, but she finds a way to make it better.
Turn Out the Lights is a rich, moving work that creates a communion of sorts, an acknowledgement that the little victories are worth embracing even if salvation seems utterly out of reach.
Turn Out the Lights will find relevancy as long as there are people with ears and feelings. It prioritizes and gives weight to our everyday struggles with our own mortality, confidence, and self-worth. Baker is writing faultless songs that will always have a home in our hearts because finding comfort in even the saddest moments means we're still feeling.
Julien Baker takes a vitally human approach to a range of weighty topics on her striking second album Turn Out The Lights.
Before, it was easy to see Baker’s vulnerability as childlike, but Turn Out The Lights proves she’s had enough pain to last several lifetimes. There’s an elegance to her music that wasn’t there before—a sudden bright piano riff over deep guitar; a harrowing, shouted acapella—that feels like a coming of age.
Baker is careful not to glorify life's darkest moments, and certainly doesn't on Turn Out the Lights. Rather, her candid portrayal of pain is a rare and beautiful gift.
Two years later, Baker is back with Turn Out The Lights, which gently expands the sonic boundaries of her haunting folk ballads. On her second album, the Memphis singer firmly establishes herself as America’s high priestess of pain, a young songwriter who, like Joni Mitchell and Elliott Smith before her, interrogates human emotion with nuanced complexity and devastating self-awareness.
Turn Out the Lights is an exciting sophomore effort from an even more exciting artist. While the album isn’t a tremendous leap forward from Sprained Ankle, Baker emerges with her vision and voice more fully formed.
Baker’s lyrics have always been at the heart of proceedings, and this album is no different: it’s still confessional, honest and intensely personal in the same way Sprained Ankle was.
Across all of Turn Out the Lights, Baker doesn’t pull a single punch, and things can get remarkably dark.
Turn Out the Lights is far from a happy album, but my word, it is riddled with joy.
Turn Out the Lights feels like the second date, with Baker more comfortable filling in blanks about her life and struggles that seemed to soon to share on her debut.
Though sometimes it teeters on hammy sentimentality, the bulk of Turn Out the Lights portrays an artist who could move towards serious commercial viability. But the sadness that she communicates is her truthful testimony, and it’ll serve as a cathartic vessel to many for years to come.
At times, Turn Out the Lights is so nakedly personal it plays like an album of torn-out diary entries, and it feels as intrusive as hearing a neighbour's twilight sobs leaking through a partition wall.
she is like an angel, her voice her music, that dreamy vibs she write, i always love anything comes out from her, she makes you calm and relaxed, then she takes out a great passion in the end of every song, the whole album is amazing with a lot of stand out tracks all over it, i will always return for this record for a long of time.
my top 3 songs are:
1- Hurt Less
2- Turn Out the Lights
3- Appointments
Hitting the mark yet again, Julien Baker presents another batch of songs as somber and beautiful as the last.
First and foremost, one can notice the technical improvements that Julien has made since her previous project from the get-go, going from the sparseness of just her and her guitar on Sprained Ankle to a wide range of instrumentation here. Julien's trajectory is apparent nowhere else than in the one-two starter of 'Over' and 'Appointments,' opening the album with a beautiful mixing of ... read more
i was disappointed with little oblivions and so i wanted too see if Julien was capable of executing the sound she failed at with little oblivions, and here, she doesn't, because its a different genre and sound, but she fucking nails this genre anyways, this album is stunning, its incredibly immersive and the lyrics are so poetic and punishing, while the tracks can sound similar to each other, they still each have their own lyrics that make them stand out, the vocals are also so dynamic and ... read more
this is gorgeous and might be better then Sprained Ankle (which i also gave a 9). the vocals on this are on point, the instrumentation is borderline perfect and all the tracks work so well together and this album also has a really good transition between those first 2 tracks. didnt expect this to be as good as it was but im glad it is, this is so good.
fav track: every single one
1 | Over 1:28 | 84 |
2 | Appointments 4:33 | 91 |
3 | Turn Out The Lights 3:23 | 88 |
4 | Shadowboxing 3:53 | 89 |
5 | Sour Breath 3:04 | 90 |
6 | Televangelist 4:52 | 84 |
7 | Everything to Help You Sleep 4:21 | 83 |
8 | Happy to Be Here 4:16 | 85 |
9 | Hurt Less 3:59 | 85 |
10 | Even 3:33 | 86 |
11 | Claws in Your Back 4:38 | 91 |