FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Julien Baker – Little Oblivions
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IN this Vinyl Corner…
I am concentrating on an album that was released just this year. Julien Baker’s excellent Little Oblivions is an album I would encourage people to get on vinyl. This is how Rough Trade describe the record:
“Little Oblivions is the third studio album by Julien Baker. Recorded in Memphis, TN, the record weaves together unflinching autobiography with assimilated experience and hard-won observations from the past few years, taking Baker’s capacity for storytelling to new heights. It also marks a sonic shift, with the songwriter’s intimate piano and guitar arrangements newly enriched by bass, drums, keyboards, banjo, and mandolin with nearly all of the instruments performed by Baker”.
Tennessee-born Baker has received widespread critical acclaim for her music. Her songs often tackle issues of spirituality, addiction, mental illness, and human nature. In addition to her solo work, Baker is known as a member of Boygenius alongside Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus. I think she is one of the finest artists on the scene and, on her remarkable third solo album, she has hit new levels of brilliance. I haven’t heard songs from Little Oblivions played a lot on radio since its release. It is a pity, as it is such a fine record with so many highlights. The single, Hardline, is one of my favourite of the year. I think that Baker will continue to grow as an artist. With three terrific solo albums under her belt, one can see and hear that quality.
The reviews for Little Oblivions have been largely positive. In their review of the album, DIY observed the following:
“I’m telling my own fortune, something I cannot escape,” offers Julien Baker on ‘Hardline’, the opening track on her expansive third studio album; a step away from the acoustic led singer-songwriter affair of her first two outings. Her words perfectly establish what’s to follow across the record’s twelve tracks, songs that continue to make often self-deprecating observations about herself and others that feel as vital as they are inescapable. Julien has forged a space from laying her demons bare and the hunt for some semblance of solace, and ‘Little Oblivions’ is no different.
Like slow-burning debut ‘Sprained Ankle’ and 2017’s ‘Turn Out The Lights’, Julien’s latest doesn’t attest to look for answers. By closer ‘Ziptie’, her outlook is as bleak as it has largely always been. “Tired of collecting my scars,” she sings, “somebody’s got my head in a ziptie.” The lyrics are accompanied by an expanse of instrumentation previously absent from her sound, and drums drive ‘Little Oblivions’ forward with a disarming urgency. At times, the hushed subtlety of the two previous records is all-but forgotten, not least as ‘Ringside’ leans on heavy reverb and ‘Repeat’ turns to electronic pulses and distorted vocals. It’s new territory for Julien, but one she traverses with ease, complementing her more overt tales of faith, inebriation and inter-personal relationships”.
I would encourage everyone to buy the album. Although the lyrics are very honest and, at times, brutal, it does not make for an uncomfortable listen. The songs are revealing and captivating – something many critics have picked up on. This is what CLASH said in their review:
“You say it isn’t cut and dry, oh it’s not all black and white,” Julien Baker sings at the outset of ‘Little Oblivions’. “What if it’s all black, baby, all the time?”
Since 2015’s ‘Sprained Ankle’, appropriately, the Tennessee songwriter has built a catalogue of songs that explore the range of coloured bruises, grey zones, and emotional fractures sustained across a lifetime, observed up close in painful detail. On her third album, the view has swung from microcosm to breathtaking panorama.
It’s also louder. ‘Ringside’ is all soft-rock euphoria, while the bass-drum that arrives during ‘Repeat’ evokes her boygenius bandmate Phoebe Bridgers’ ‘I Know The End’. On ‘Hardline’, the effect is overwhelming; crushingly beautiful, it is perhaps Baker’s finest moment.
There are periods of reprieve: ‘Heatwave’ and ‘Favor’ feel simultaneously darker and cosier than the rest of the record. But it’s hard not to long for that dazzling brightness again, the hearts-on-sleeves yearning, as if one day the greys might finally wash away forever”.
The more I listen to Little Oblivions the more it affects me. I think Julien Baker is one of the most interesting and accomplished young songwriters in the world. I look forward to seeing how her career progresses.
There were a few interviews released around the time the album came out in February. Apologies for slightly mangling the VICE interview, but there were a few segments that caught my attention:
“Many who’ve found themselves out of work, furloughed, or otherwise marooned from their ordinary lives will have identified with such dissatisfaction at some point over the past year, left with only time and the inside of their minds, once the trappings of social life were stripped away by lockdowns. For Baker, however, this feeling is not an entirely new one – she remembers a time when something similar set in a couple of years ago. “2019, for me, was a lot of the exercise I hear people describing in quarantine, because I had come off of the road,” she tells me. “It wasn't healthy for me to be touring anymore. And I just had to exist in this new, unfamiliar space where I was not constantly collapsing my own identity with the persona that I and other people had cultivated for me as a performer.”
This “persona” developed because Baker’s profile grew exponentially around her second full-length record, the rapturous and critically beloved Turn Out the Lights, which came out in 2017. The album built on her more lo-fi 2015 debut Sprained Ankle, in an unexpected manner. Over email, Baker’s contemporary and bandmate Phoebe Bridgers describes her ambition and innovation: “People loved that first record, myself included,” Bridgers writes. “If Julien wanted to, she could have stayed in her lane and made that same kind of record over and over. Instead she decided to play drums and deconstruct guitar pedals and scream. By the time people (me) were trying to copy the way she sounded on Sprained Ankle, she didn’t even sound like that anymore.”
What Baker had created instead, using organs, loop pedals, and cavernous-sounding production, was a new canvas upon which to display her almost unmatched gift for facing down the parts of the psyche that many of us shy away from. Indeed, the most accurate description I have heard of what Baker does comes courtesy of the poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib, who accurately describes her as a master of “what whispers in through the cracks of a person’s time alone.”
Detailing this feeling on “Relative Fiction,” a song on Little Oblivions, she describes herself as “A character of somebody's invention / A martyr in another passion play.” “I guess I don't mind losing my conviction / If it's all relative fiction anyway,” Baker sings, addressing the disconnect she was beginning to feel between the way she was written about, and the facts of her reality. The track, then – as most of those on the album do – explores this period in Baker’s life as one when she had to, in her words, “re-approach” her “relationship to sobriety.”
“Saying that I was sober for a really long time, and that I went through a period of being deeply, destructively involved with substances again – it felt like a failure at first,” she tells me. “But now, it feels like understanding that recovery, growth, or any sort of ideal of self improvement isn't linear helps your world not implode when something goes wrong.”
Little Oblivions sounds like a record made by someone who has had that realisation, and is comfortable and even happy in it. This emotional progression is mirrored sonically, as the record builds out from Baker’s catalogue so far. Some songs feel like direct continuations – second track “Heatwave,” for example, recalls the simplicity of Sprained Ankle’s “Everybody Does,” before swelling into a full band ending, while “Favor” employs the backing vocals of her boygenius bandmates. Others, like the first single “Faith Healer,” with its electronic inflections, try something new, though Baker’s voice – by turns delicate and powerful, so gilded-sounding that to hear it on these new songs still feels, in a manner, holy – remains its guiding principle.
Comparing the process of making the new album with her older work (wherein, she says “there was something about the essentialism of making very stripped back music with very few instruments that felt like a good exercise at the time”), Baker describes a more free-flowing process: “I wanted to have less arbitrary perimeters around music,” she tells me. “I tried to use sounds very conceptually on previous records. And on this record, I think it was more about just collecting noises that sounded interesting to me.”
Like Baker’s previous music, however, the album does not shy away from self-recrimination or accounts of hurt caused, though it does seem that perhaps she has gained something different from displaying such candour this time. “Although it is pretty masochistic to make a record that is like a laundry list of my failings to myself and others,” she laughs, “it’s relieving. It’s relieving to like, disappoint, in a way. It builds a more earnest relationship with someone, when you allow yourself not to be perfect. And I think it also makes you more merciful, with yourself and with others”.
I will end things there. Little Oblivions is, in my view, one of this year’s best albums. Do yourself a favour and go and check it out. I really love the album and, as I said, I am interested to see where Baker goes next in her career. Four years after the excellent Turn Out the Lights, Julien Baker released what could be her best album to date. Little Oblivions is yet another stunning release from…
THE multi-talented songwriter.