About halfway through Lizzie No’s opening track (the title cut), a wall of sound begins to echo a haunting three-note refrain. Soon the sound erupts into explosions blossoming out of previous explosions, and then it goes quiet again, then louder and quieter again. This movement between the vulnerable and the impenetrable calls to mind everything from the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to Otis Redding’s “Try A Little Tenderness,” without any of that last example’s hopeful suggestions. That's as it should be. The dynamics of this opener forecast the concerns of an enormous record.
And with
huge rockers like the snarling “Lagunita” to launch the middle third and the foot-to-the-floor
“Getaway Car” before the final song’s quiet coda, that big sound outlines the
scope of rock itself—probing past seemingly unendurable pain and dreaming past
received and “reasonable” limits. Lizzie No wants it all, and over the course
of this album, she suggests what she wants is within her grasp, or at least the
grasp of the album’s persona/avatar, the she/her/they/them Miss Freedomland.
No has
explained that she wanted to use the concept of a videogame and an avatar to get
away from the way fans or media read the personal into women’s work. At least that's how I interpreted her explanation. As a writer who has often focused on
women, that’s certainly what I’ve seen, the tendency magnified as a few women
have become dominant forces in the industry. It is hard to imagine people
making the assumptions about real-life relationships that are made with Taylor
Swift and Beyonce if the subject were any of The Beatles or Bob Dylan, and I
highly doubt Post Malone or Morgan Wallen get that treatment either. Even if they do, No's work-around works well, allowing her to write extraordinarily
personal music, whatever it has to do with the artist’s real life.
The specifics in the lyrics and the music matter. I love the “hollow shell” of the moon in “Sleeping in the Next Room” as well as the shimmering vocal blend with Kate Victor and Sadie Dupuis. I love how “Lagunita” has all the fury of the best post punk (tip of the hat to guitarist Graham Richman and drummer Fred Eltringham throughout) as well as the way No hangs onto the taste of the “calf in the gelatin.”
No’s website
quotes Toni Cade Bambara saying, “The role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible.”
That’s just what No does repeatedly here, tearing away all hobbling ties on “The
Heartbreak Store,” “Done,” “Annie Oakley,” “Shield and Sword,” and “Mourning
Dove Waltz.” To underscore the irresistible qualities, that last sounds like a Carol
King record about a mother accepting the necessary loss of her children to go
and live their own lives.
Official Video for "The Heartbreak Store"
No first really hooked me with “Deadbeat,” a song about a woman recognizing her father’s worst qualities in herself. In at least one interview, No has talked about this as a flip on the typical country music script where the male singer’s hopeless qualities are romanticized. That said, what hooked me about the song wasn’t a sense of parody. It was the truth of it. I have known and loved people who could sing this straight, and I am this person more than I would like to admit. The fact that No goes there—with a knowing and even funny sense of irony—makes it work as well as any such song by a man, only deepened by that gender reversal. And there are a few archetypical country songs on this record, but this one doubles down on a strength of the genre—its hard focus on a clever and engaging lyric, shimmering guitar arpeggios and long-bowed strings simply underscoring the sad truth of it all.
The album
ends with “Babylon,” a modest little folk song that defines the promised land
based on all that’s being left behind—thieves and killers, fears of pain, the
threats of shame, and the devil itself, in all its forms. The guitar roll that’s
propelled this vision forward keeps going after the words end, pushing onward
to what might be, what could be, and not only asking us but making us want to follow
its lead.
