The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We

Pandora woke up and chose violence today, so thank you SoundCloud for sponsoring this review!

Mitski is an artist that I’ve heard of for years now, but I haven’t listened to her music until a couple of weeks ago and that was through an album swap. Anyway, although I didn’t connect with ‘Be The Cowboy’ a ton, it was still a very impressive project and one that really hyped me up for this one. So I bet y’all can assume how I felt when my streaming service purposefully ATTACKED me today and I learned I’d have to wait at least 7 hours before I listened to it (School has no wifi for phones so YouTube was ruled out).

But then me being a genius, learned that I could listen to it on SoundCloud in my World Cultures class! The dream was saved!

So… I did nearly cry in class…

It’s crazy because I don’t get Mitski’s lyrics. I can’t just listen to her and dissect her crazy Art Pop metaphors on the go. I have to physically drop everything I’m doing and read the lyrics to really understand where she’s getting with a song and boy, when you do it’s rewarding.

Her ability to write lyrics this rich is mainly due to her depressing herself from the pressures of the mainstream audience. You can rarely meet all of the expectations they have for you and your sounds, so why even attempt to? And with that don’t care attitude, Mitski creates some of the best content in the Art Pop genre. That’s it…

The lyricism on this album spans from religious allusions, to creatively crafted metaphors, to straight out vulnerability. Tracks like ‘I’m Your Man’ and ‘Star’ share aspects of not being able to love another as you should and the love fading away; ‘I Don’t Like My Mind’ and ‘When Memories Snow’ are about the mental scape and the things we hold their; ‘Bug Like An Ángel’ is about self destructive mannerisms. She truly strips anything and everything back to create an album that functions as a safe and relatable space. She never fails to evoke emotions from her listeners, and that is magnified on this project.

Mitski also has a voice! The production on the album works really well with Mitski as an artist, modge podging together multiple genres in a somewhat cohesive album. The vocals are left practically unaffected on the record though, with only some reverb and vocal enhancers working as makeup for her voice. The vocal layering and choir also work when she adds them, creating a really hollowed out space for Mitski’s raw vocals to fill up.

Instruments on the project are majorly scarce compared to a lot of her previous music. Typically on this project you get a piano, some drums, and maybe a bass here and there. It’s incredibly stripped compared to the likes of ‘Be The Cowboy’, but it works here. Not to mention that she uses other sounds coming from some synths, dogs, and cicadas to create an atmosphere unlike any others… it’s truly magical and melancholic at the same time.

But I truly think the most important part of this project has to be her emotional value. It’s extremely relatable to all listeners (Got told today I wouldn’t get her music because I was Gay nor Depressed… Major L on that person) and it sticks too. Being someone with SAD and GAD, ‘I Don’t Like My Mind’ hit me like a truck. It’s crazy how much emotion she was able to shove into a song; it’s almost too much. She’s really charismatic in her own way, and that shines on this album.

So yeah… this is a good one.
What’s ‘Laurel Hell’? Never heard of Mitski missing 🤔