WORDS Brian Carroll PHOTO Domino Recording Company
One common trick to get kids to try a new, healthy food is to lie to them and say it’s junk.
Psychologists say it takes fifteen tastes of the stuff before they actually choose it for their own plates, but the seeds of a nutritious diet have to be planted one way or another. How close I came to lying to you, dear readers, but you are not children, so I’m going to be perfectly honest: Loud City Song is extremely good, and good for you. This third release in as many years from the classical-minded, LA-based multi-instrumentalist Julia Holter stands like a monumental stalk of broccoli, beaming with vitamins, in the landscape of teeth-rotting candy confections, cash grabs, and monotonous “party music” we listeners allow to define what pop music should be in 2013.
The record opens not with a bang, but with a whimper. A particularly timid facet of Holter’s versatile singing voice opens the show, and though you can be pretty sure she’s just warming up, the silence surrounding her is strangely nerve-wracking. “Heaven / All the heavens of the world,” she honks like a trumpet, with a woozy exhaustion that implies she may be genuinely considering them all at once. The same trick is then applied to other, earthbound nouns throughout the song, to clever and wistful effect. You can hear the white noise of the unplayed instruments to follow hissing lightly in the background, and when they finally reveal themselves amid her sweet background vocal harmonies, it seems they aim to squish her like a bug. As the song unfolds, the ominous, bow-played classical bass, muted horn section, and harpsichord turn out to be hers to command, rather than the other way around. The world of inevitable disappointments from which she first appears to be hiding is consciously acknowledged to be a byproduct of her own too-sensitive hyper-awareness, and she declares herself a coward, too afraid to leave her own home to find love.
By the end of the song, you’ll have traveled through musical history from the Gershwin era back three hundred years to the dreamy melancholy of Antonio Vivaldi. Ladies and gentlemen, this is complex, unnerving, juicy stuff, and that’s just the first song. That Ms. Holter is able to convey so much information in such a small space is a testament not only to her incredible talent as a songwriter, but to her sheer will to deprogram the stupid and lazy out of our ears.
As the album progresses from that dark mood to the second song, we find our blood pressure raised again by an increasingly cacophonous smattering of jazzily played, sleepy cymbal washes. The music that follows a lead-in like that could be absolutely anything, and you begin to realize Ms. Holter stubbornly capitalizes on unpredictability. The music around which these cymbals are wrapped is decadent, atmospheric, glamourous, and halfway through the excessive shower of attention, fame, and riches she conjures on this song, Holter loosens up. She pulls out a new, playful voice from her bag of tricks, like a dinner date who suddenly realizes they may have more in common with their would-be suitor than initially realized, beginning to enjoy their company for more than an excuse to leave the house.
A rock song, ‘Horns Surrounding Me,’ follows, featuring a Philip Glass-esque pattern of quarter notes stamping away from the horn section like a hellish death march over claustrophobic oompah organs. Holter’s no sell out, and strange as it sounds, this track could have been a hit single for demonstration purposes alone. But instead of starting in immediately, it begins with a radio un-friendly sample of a man running and panting, the singer depicting a chase between Little Red Riding Hood and The Big Bad Wolf that is taking them into that story’s creepy European forest, beset with unfamiliar dark pines. By the time the blistering dissonance of an echo-drenched keyboard turns the melody black and wicked in the chorus, we hear a distinct eighties “goth beatles” vibe emerge from the record, as if straight out of the Souxie and the Banshees playbook.
Ms. Holter here finally reveals herself to be a powerful witch, playing with our idea of her personality like a puppet master. Indeed, if female songwriters of this caliber were unleashed in less busy times and put on display for all to see, it is likely we’d find Holter burned at the stake for merely being so noticeable. Yet, in our culture of zero downtime, Holter’s music can stay in the shadows and be stunning and brilliant without anyone even noticing, merely because it takes a second to kick in, the average insectoid pop listener overlooking it completely for not kicking them in the groin within the first few seconds of playback.
I won’t spoil the rest, as the album’s remaining songs spiral around in a cosmic swirl that hints at the cheeky, jazzy pop of a pre-ambient Brian Eno and the ethereal lovestuff of sexy, late-night electronic groups from the nineties like Everything But the Girl and Massive Attack. Call it anti-pop, if you must, but Holter zigs where all others zag, and she has made, without a shadow of a doubt, the best female pop album since Bat for Lashes and St. Vincent came onto the scene, a couple of talented chanteuses who may soon be furious at this relative newcomer for reducing them to cartoon characters with a wave of her bookish hand.
Reminiscent of the calculating experimentation of Laurie Anderson, but reinforced by the trailblazing of Kate Bush, Joanna Newsom, Broadcast, and Portishead, Holter enjoys a unique position of complete creative control over her darkly romantic genius without the distraction of commercial attention, or even an audience. Loud City Song is not loud, but should be played at a high volume on nice speakers (or through a pair of nice headphones) to truly hear the intertwining instrumental play and really get a feel for the shape of the jaw-dropping production. This is an intentionally invisible, criminally fine work, and will likely be honored as the best overall album of the year by many critics come December. It’s a dark horse from a powerful nobody, armed with a small orchestra and a million ideas about what modern music should be. Classy, bold, and emotionally on point, Loud City Song is a piece of timeless architecture, constructed out of music so solid it will still sound pretty good five months, years, decades, and centuries from now. There is nothing terribly bad to say about this masterpiece, other than the fact that it is deliberately hiding from us all.
Even if you pirate music, you’ll want to pay for the obsession this album provides after hearing it a couple times. Despite being pretty good on first listen, it really gets under your skin after a few, eventually providing your flesh with goosebumps on nearly every track, especially the weepy ballad ‘Hello Stranger.’ The album is at its weakest when it sounds other people, even the best contemporary artists we know. In summation, Loud City Song is outstanding, bar-raising, filmic, mind-boggling, and to give it the highest praise an album can get these days: It’s worth actual money! Holter puts everyone who has made a pop record in recent memory to shame. Big words, I know, but this is an album for people who use big words. It’s remarkable, and has to be heard at high volume to be appreciated. Destined for cult status due to its lack of marketability in a climate that rewards twerking with front page headlines, get this album (out on Domino) right now before it becomes rare in less metaphorical ways. Worth going without breakfast and lunch to hear over dinner. Vital music lives!
Listen and purchase Holter’s album at www.dominorecordco.us