Mental Illness

For 44 minutes, Mann slips into the skin of someone walking an emotional tightrope, and it’s an act she pulls of with grace and conviction. Mann’s music has never lacked for warmth or heart, but her latest songs are the kind of delicate bruisers that feel like they might fall apart in your hands if you sneeze.

The interplay among tune, lyrics and production rewards repeated listens with ever more intricate emotional textures.

This is not a flash album, there are no virtuoso flourishes by any of the players. Every note has been carefully positioned to frame her voice in a sympathetic and supportive way and recorded simply and elegantly.

While there’s a melancholy that filters through her soft waltzes, Mental Illness is first and foremost an album about achieving self-sufficiency through trail and blunder. And in doing so, she once again stands tallest, and quietest, in an exceptionally consistent career.

Mann's best work has always lingered on such private reverie, and Mental Illness is one of her most ravishing and affecting hymns to solitude.

Each of the 11 numbers is exquisitely sculpted, with the melody carrying a sense of subdued drama as it marches from verse to chorus to bridge. These songs are crafted in the best sense of the word, with the lyrics delivering sublime twists that the music matches.

The album’s music is intimate and reflective. Drums rarely figure alongside the acoustic guitar, piano and string arrangements which motor gently, and a compelling consistency of mood makes Mental Illness easy to get lost in.

Happily, all is not melancholy here. In fact, most of the tracks are upbeat. The songs’ characters may be unloved and disturbed, but aren’t we all?

Mental Illness is Aimee Mann’s quintessential statement, tempering the discord of life with elegant chamber folk. Mann fills her songs with ordinary people struggling against operatic levels of pain.