New, sealed
Despite its two-plus decades spent soundtracking makeout sessions, it cradles a terrible loneliness in its heart. Despite its reputation as dinner-party music, it is straight-up discomfort food: curl-up-and-die music, head-under-the-covers music. It’s dark, dank, and quintessentially Bristol, mingling a chilling harbor fog with the resin of a thousand spliffs left to burn down in a haze.
In “Wandering Star,” her tone sounds almost flirtatious, despite the overwhelming vastness of her subject matter: “Wandering stars/For whom it is reserved/The blackness, the darkness, forever.” In the closing “Glory Box,” on the other hand, she is as incendiary as Utley’s overdriven guitar riffs, and when she sings, “This is the beginning/Of forever and ever, oh,” her sigh feels like a hole torn in the fabric of the universe.
excerpts from Philip Sherburne’s Pitchfork review