Lenker's work continues to reimagine love and loss, and albums like songs are her way of turning those complex emotions into something timeless.
Much like the rest of Adrianne’s catalogue, Songs is characterised by its purity of expression and an unbridled vulnerability most of us can only dream of offering - we can be grateful she gifts it so fearlessly.
songs is Lenker’s most complete, her most personal work; her least comprehensible, but her most comprehensive.
The Big Thief singer approaches familiar themes of loss, solitude, memory, and regret in some of the most vivid songwriting of her career.
Adrianne Lenker’s songs is beautiful and ugly in all the best ways.
She has found a finer balance between her more abstract images and cutting to the quick, which makes her gentle poetry more impactful than ever.
Playing alone and unadorned, every song is written from the first person, creating Lenker's most unguarded album yet.
Whereas abysskiss stayed on drearier paths, songs is as colorful and varied as her grandmother’s painting of wildflowers that adorns its cover.
The entirety of the album is transportive. Even through the fragility of the songs and performance, it feels as if Lenker physically grabs you and places you directly in front of herself, singing these songs in a cabin in the woods.
Sometimes she lets us in on the context of the visceral moments she conjures, but the images on Songs feel different. The anger and sorrow feel more pointed, more active.
The sparse palette - Lenker’s acoustic, incidental percussion, reassuring tape hiss - serves to isolate the quiet brilliance of the melodies, setting their winding, spontaneous beauty against angst that spans existential questioning and the nuts and bolts of severing ties with someone you care about.
Painful memories are twirling around in Lenker’s head on Songs. It’s an album that lives up to it’s name by capturing the basic, natural truth of her art.
Despite their instrumental sparsity, songs and instrumentals are albums rich in detail, and when taken as a whole they feel less like a question and more like a resolution.
While not an essential album for fans of Big Thief, admirers of Lenker's solo work will find another reliably solid, touching set of songs here.
Songs draws itself into clearer focus through Lenker's sweet, freshly-cut voice, her jingle-jangle mornings full of emptiness and self-doubt.
#2 | / | The New Yorker: Amanda Petrusich |
#2 | / | Vulture |
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#9 | / | The Independent |