FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Clairo - Immunity
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I was going to include this album …
for Pride Month. Although it ended a few days ago, I should have tried to nestle it in somewhere. Apart from the fact that Claro is an important member of the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community (as she came out as bisexual), she prepares to release her second album, Sling, on 16th July. 2019’s Immunity is her extraordinary debut. Arriving a year after the debut E.P., Diary 001, Immunity is a triumphant album. With most tracks written by the Georgia-born Claire Cottrill, there is that personal relevance. The American musician, on her debut album, is incredibly established. By that, it sounds like she has been in the industry for years. There are no nerves or wasted moments. Despite one or two mixed reviews, Immunity won a lot of love! With some songs written alongside Rostam Batmanglij (who Clairo produced the album with), the eleven-track Immunity was placed in many top-fifty end-of-year lists – the Los Angeles Times named it their fifth-favourite album of 2019. I would urge people to buy Immunity on vinyl:
“Last year, 20-year-old multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and producer Clairo crashed onto our radars with her self-produced debut Pretty Girl. The song went viral and quickly catapulted her from dorm-room obscurity to becoming one of the biggest critically acclaimed artists to emerge in 2018. With 350-million combined global streams (and counting) under her belt, a Coachella debut in the bag, as well as sold out tours across North America, Europe and Asia, Clairo is ready to embark on a new chapter and certainly has the talent, credibility and fan base to carry her. Equipped with a stunning debut album titled Immunity - co-produced by Rostam (Vampire Weekend) - Bags offers listeners an exciting glimpse into the artist’s growth both as a young queer woman, straight out of college, who, instead of riding the wave of internet hype, took a chance, stepped out of the limelight and focused on what really mattered to her: making an incredible, cohesive body of work, that she can be truly proud of”.
It is worth bringing in a couple of positive reviews for Immunity. There is so much to love about the album. In their review, NME offered these observations:
“‘Immunity’, her debut album, is the most open the door into her world has ever been. Written after suddenly finding herself the focus of viral success thanks to her 2017 track ‘Pretty Girl’, the record finds the Massachusetts-born, New York-based musician on a voyage of self-discovery, reckoning with the parts that make up who she is. There are sad stories and happy ones, but the overall sense is that telling them to the universe is putting the power back in Cottrill’s hands.
It’s bookended by two of the weightiest songs Cottrill has released so far. Opener ‘Alewife’ quietly looks back to a night when she was 13 and on the brink of suicide. A friend managed to stop her from doing anything irreversible, which she solemnly promises she would have done without an intervention. “Swear I could have done it if you weren’t there when I hit the floor,” she half-whispers, the softly plonking piano fading out and the heartbeat drum rhythms faltering as she does.
On the other side, ‘I Wouldn’t Ask You’ details the rising star’s struggle with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and how that impacted on her college relationship. The first half of the seven-minute song is downbeat and stark, only Cottrill, a sparse piano line and the vulnerable voices of a choir of nine-year-olds working together to reflect the helplessness she felt as her partner lovingly looked after her. Midway through, everything shifts. The gloom clears, programmed drum beats snap in and synths that sound like light breaking through the clouds gently flutter in. In the background, the kids sing a message of strength: “We could be so good / We’ll be alright, we’ll be alright.”
In between the two, Cottrill revisits old heartaches and heartbreaks, and offers a glimpse into her experiences of figuring out her sexuality. On the soft, crackling ‘Feel Something’, she runs into an ex at a party and dejectedly declares: “We could be something special if you wanted / I’m afraid that if we tried to, you would just give up.” The Auto-Tuned, bass-driven ‘Closer To You’, meanwhile, finds her trying to get through to someone she knows is bad for her but she can’t help pursuing.
Cottrill is a master at penning lyrics that make you feel like you’re listening to hushed secrets from a friend, but she also has a knack for crafting melodies and rhythms that make you really feel what she’s going through in any given song. Sometimes that means your body surging with adrenaline, your heart racing and limbs fidgeting, as is the case with ‘Bags’. Written about having feelings for a close friend and the dilemma of whether or not to to tell her, it’s full of nervous energy, epitomised by the unintentional noises escaping from Cottrill’s guitar. As she moves her fingers up and down her fretboard, the sound of her skin on the strings causes a series of deep squeaks that sound as if she’s anxiously taking big gulps or gasping for breath.
At other times, that means joyously flinging yourself around your room, giddy from finally feeling comfortable with who you are. ‘Sofia’, one of the most infectious and lively songs on the album, bounces on a Strokes-y staccato strum and Danielle Haim’s punchy drum beats. It’s already a celebratory moment but it becomes dizzyingly so when a thick layer of distortion fuses its layers together midway through. “I don’t want to say goodbye / I think we could do it if we tried,” the 20-year-old sings as the noise subsides, confidently addressing her first female crushes like Sofia Coppola and Sofia Vergara.
‘Immunity’ is an album to burrow into and become resident in its songs. It’s a comforter that wraps itself around you when you’re feeling low and a resilient reminder that there are brighter times ahead. It’s also a great big gleaming signpost that its creator is one of the smartest, subtlest young musicians around, and someone with plenty more tricks up her sleeve”.
I would say to people to go and pre-order Sling. It is an album that promises to be as strong and affecting as Clairo’s debut. Immunity is a stunning album that offers so many rewards. I do like quoting reviews for albums, as each person provides a separate take and sense of perspective. This is what Pitchfork said in their review:
“Immunity brings in new personnel—produced by Rostam Batmanglij, mixed by Dave Fridmann, assisted on drums by Danielle Haim—for a new direction. Clairo’s often compared to one of her teenage idols Frankie Cosmos, both for making lo-fi pop and for becoming entangled in some exhausting discourse about her father’s bankroll and industry ties. But where Frankie Cosmos’ spiritual precursor is college rock, Clairo’s, at least on Immunity, is soft rock. The uptempo tracks are breezy and chill; the ballads are lush and deeply felt. Reverb’d keyboards abound. Several tracks have children’s choirs, but—if such a thing is possible—subtle ones. The fit is surprisingly natural; she certainly sounds much more at ease here than on the likes of an earlier collaboration like “B.O.M.D.,” where Danny L Harle’s trop-pop fripperies sound in retrospect at odds with Cottrill’s plainspoken voice.
Perils do lie this way; much of Immunity approaches the very sad, very posh, and very produced ballads of adult-contemporary drears like London Grammar or Låpsley. (“Feel Something” comes closest to this sound; not coincidentally, it’s the weakest cut.) But, crucially, the album only tiptoes up to the edge of huge production and no further. It’s truly remarkable how many of these tracks, if they were produced even one iota larger, would collapse into mush, and how much restraint it must have taken not to blow them up that big. Opener “Alewife” builds, but modestly: a recorder counterpoint, a little drum fill, some light guitar fuzz, less of a breakdown than a heart skip. “Closer to You” could have been easily overpowered either by the 808s and Heartbreak-style AutoTune on the verses or the power-ballad guitar on the chorus; it isn’t. The children's choirs and vocal processing on “I Wouldn’t Ask You” aren’t there to make the song swell but to dissolve away, leaving a sparse, almost hymn-like arrangement of piano, Cottrill’s un-vocoded melody, and nothing else. “Sofia” is powered by a “Dancing on My Own” synth chug—about the most surefire banger fodder there is—but one that remains in the background beneath crackly, distorted guitar (a late addition). The closest thing to trend-chasing is “Softly,” a Y2K pop-R&B ballad like something TLC or Mya might have recorded as an album track—which is far from bad.
The restraint isn’t just there to be tasteful, but to keep the focus on Cottrill’s voice and words, which have become touchstones for what seems like a full generation of listeners. “You can barely hear what I’m saying on all of my demos on Soundcloud. Maybe that was a style thing or an insecurity thing. Maybe it’s both,” she told Vice of her old music. That’s standard interview stuff, the lorem ipsum of the lo-fi artist who’s graduated to hi-fi. But it’s also true: up front and clear, Cottrill’s voice exudes a quiet warmth and intimacy, whether confessing a personal crisis on “Alewife” (named for the Boston T stop) or realizing she’s fallen for a girl friend in “Sofia"—going from “I think we could do it if we tried” to “Oh my god, I think I’m in love with you" in two verses’ span, as if she’s only just realized it mid-track, in real time.
Last year, Clairo came out as bisexual, and she’s said much of Immunity is about the accompanying experience: crushing on friends, looking for unspoken signs, generally dealing with feelings that one’s still grappling with being possible, let alone reciprocated. For every outright love song there’s one, like breakthrough single “Bags,” that dwells in the everyday and the liminal spaces therein. What Clairo sings about is mundane but charged—watching TV, “wasting time on the couch,” but also dropping hints (like a subtle Call Me By Your Name reference in the verse) and tentatively offering that if the song’s subject were to make a move she wouldn’t mind, really. The melody of the chorus is morose, a flattened affect and a resigned shrug: “I guess this could be worse/Walking out the door with your bags” All the feeling is in the instrumental, chiming above, quietly gorgeous. “Can you see me using everything to hold back?” Clairo sings, and though she’s referring to her crush, she could just as well be singing about Immunity. The effort sounds effortless”.
I’ll leave it there. Ahead of the release of Clairo’s second album, Sling, I wanted to revisit and highlight her exceptional debut. Immunity is an album that was rightly hailed as one of the best of 2019. I think Sling will take Clairo to new heights and ensure that her music reaches a new audience. Immunity is an album that people should check out, as it sounds wonderful and…
PERFECT on vinyl.