Madeline Kenney

A New Actuality Thoughts

Carpark

Jul 28, 2023
Net Unique

By Caleb Campbell

Madeline Kenney’s music is all about subtleties. Her songs resist the straightforward path of easy hooks, as an alternative discovering their biggest successes in twisting rhythms, swirling harmonics, and evocative textures. Her melodies are curious and stressed, but they usually resolve to silken conclusions, layered into celestial musical passages.

On her final album, 2020’s Sucker’s Lunch, that luxurious heat soundtracked Kenney within the early days of a brand new relationship, navigating the difficult waters of latest love along with her then-partner. In distinction, her newest effort offers with the waning days of romance, written as prescient reflections within the months previous to the pair’s breakup. But, the ensuing report feels much less like a “breakup album” and extra a dreamy inward journey. Moderately than meditating in darkish and downcast tones, Kenney navigates her feels bathed in daylight and iridescent synths.

The outcomes are extra insular and infrequently extra experimental than her earlier efforts. Although Kenney’s music has all the time had an clever streak, the songs right here really feel extra stripped and uncovered, with an unwavering highlight positioned on Kenney herself. She largely leaves behind the guitars that drove Suckers Lunch, as an alternative constructing soundscapes stuffed with spacious left-field electronics. After a quick ambient piano intro, “Plain Boring Catastrophe” enters floating on dizzying melodies, accompanied by putting digital percussion and Kenney’s glassy vocals, now multi-tracked into highly effective block harmonies. The monitor abruptly ends, main into the hypnotic synth arpeggios and alluring groove of “Superficial Dialog.” Each supply divergent and fascinatingly off-kilter visions of indie pop, stuffed with glittering maximalist element and delicately traced melodies.

Traditionally, Kenney has usually been discovered within the orbit of Jenn Wasner and Wye Oak, with Wasner each producing her 2018 album Good Shapes and co-producing Sucker’s Lunch alongside her Wye Oak bandmate Andy Stack. Actually, there continues to be loads of shared inventive DNA on show along with her newest effort, however A New Actuality Thoughts additionally finds Kenney moving into her personal as a producer, dealing with the entire manufacturing and recording this time round. The report was written and recorded in Kenney’s basement, and it bears each the intimate shades of that inventive course of together with Kenney’s instincts for sweeping preparations.

Although they had been recorded in a basement within the aftermath of a harsh breakup, the songs right here sound transportive and otherworldly. Kenney usually performs with lots of the identical textures all through the report, however she rearranges them into fascinating new shapes with every monitor, such because the spacefaring guitar solo on “Actuality Thoughts” or the stabs of synths and dissonant chords on “Leaves Me Dry.” Often although, she’ll shock with some towering drums as on the climax of “HFAM” or intoxicating saxophone, as on “I Drew a Line.” Her track constructions are sometimes winding and summary, continuously caught within the rush of Kenney’s shifting tone and dynamics. “Crimson Emotion” initially feels nearly ambient, but it surely later shifts right into a mesmerizing digital rhythm coloured by earworm synth hooks. Oftentimes, a towering vocal concord or dissonant chord will rush in and disappear simply as quick, hitting the listener with fractioned, minute shifts within the monitor’s sonic mix.

Inside this ethereal locale, Kenney paints a self-portrait, exploring the form of her life and relationships. Right here her lyrics don’t usually meditate on heartbreak, selecting relatively to unpack the sobering actuality of Kenney’s flawed self. “Plain Boring Catastrophe” captures the report’s confessional tone in its opening lyrics, whereas additionally gently poking enjoyable at the concept Kenney’s heartache is exclusive or revelatory: “Nicely I’d as properly sit down and check out/If nothing else, to get by/With no secrets and techniques left/Or romantic alibis/Plain boring catastrophe.” Later, “New Actuality Thoughts” explores how Kenney formed herself round her companion, and “Crimson Emotion” finds her pushing down ache and anger to appease these round her一“I’m positive with being modified by anybody/No onerous guidelines to my thoughts/You possibly can put me beneath the gun.”

These meditations type the emotional middle of New Actuality Thoughts, leaving Kenney with a report that seems like a therapeutic breakthrough as a lot as a musical evolution. Kenney approaches herself with a welcome diploma of heat and self-acceptance, a way of perspective and beauty that offers the report an ethereal sun-lit undercurrent. As a lot as these songs are reflections within the aftermath of affection misplaced, they’re equally a path ahead, providing new beginnings and new stylistic rabbit holes. On this setting, Kenney forges her plain boring disasters into gems of lush, astral artwork pop. (www.mkenneymusic.com)

Writer ranking: 7.5/10