Mitski
Laurel Hell
Art Pop (Listen)
"I guess this is the end / I'll have to learn to be somebody else / It's been you and me since before I was me / Without you, I don't yet know quite how to live," Mitski Miyawaki softly coos on the penultimate, and saddest, track from her new album Laurel Hell, "I Guess." The song is bare, highlighting Mitski's beautifully calm voice, even in the face of such heartbreak, backed only by a reverbed piano. Between verses, there is a distorted keyboard, reminiscent of Bowie's "Moss Garden." There is no chorus, only a return to the painful truth.
Laurel Hell, Mitski's sixth album, is full of these austere moments where the meaning can be decided by the listener: is the breaking relationship between Mitski and a partner, her fans, fame, the music industry, or herself? What is undebatable is the emotion it evokes. Mitski is a master of the poetic edit, distilling her thoughts and feelings down to the sparest minimum required for understanding. She once described herself in an interview as "a black hole where people dump their feelings," and like a black hole, Mitski can compress those feelings with immeasurable gravity to a single word.
Opener "Valentine, Texas" begins with a solitary, low synth line backing Mitski's echoed, enticing vocals: "Let's step carefully into the dark / Once we're in, I'll remember my way around," before informing (warning?) us that "Who will I become tonight? / I'll show you who my sweetheart's never met / Wet teeth, shining eyes." The Cure-esque fuzz of keyboards explode like a jump-scare string stab to open up the song to new heights of lush poetry: "Let's drive out to where the dust devils are made / By dancing ghosts as they kick up clouds of sand / Where the clouds look like mountains / Let me watch those mountains from underneath."
"Working for the Knife" showcases Mitski's musical chops, with an off-time metalic beat opening the song, increasing the pace and mood a bit, much more like her previous work on Be the Cowboy and Puberty 2. But here is the last time those albums will be referenced. Using her most obvious lyrics, Mitski describes how she wishes she made movies but grinding for music leaves her unable to follow any other passions: "I always knew the world moves on / I just didn't know it would go without me."
The danceable, Twin-Shadow-like bassline that opens "Stay Soft," is our first look at the new Mitski, upbeat and clubbing, all while exposing your deepest emotional frailties. "Open up your heart / Like the gates of Hell," she pleads while the chorus builds with complex tom drumming and a pounding piano, until every instrument and sound is swaying at full fever pitch. "You stay soft, get beaten / Only natural to harden up."
"Everyone" sees the return of the spare, echoing lyrics of the opener, this time lilting over a dark, minimalist sci-fi beat. "I left the door open to the dark," Mitski tells us, returning to her original theme, "I said, 'Come in, come in, whatever you are' / But it didn't want me yet." The coolness of the beat morphs into a John-Carpenter-horror theme as she continues her tragic tale: "I opened my arms wide to the dark / I said, 'Take it all, whatever you want' / I didn't know that I was young." And in a moment of pure lyrical genius, she ends with the gut-punch: "Sometimes I think I am free / Until I find I'm back in line again."
One of the best-ever examples of painting pictures with words, "Heat Lightning" describes, in perfect detail, what it's like to lie awake all night with insomnia: "I've lied awake since one and now it's four o'clock / Though I've held on, can't carry it much longer / On the ceiling dancing are the things all come and gone." The beautiful portrait is sung delicately over a lush old-school country guitar-and-piano composition with occasional cymbal ride to dramatize the imagery, which I can't state enough, is breathtaking: "Heat lightning, watch it from my doorstep / Sleeping eyelid of the sky flutters in a dream / Well, I've held on, but I feel a storm approaching / Trees are swaying in the wind like sea anemones."
Big single, "The Only Heartbreaker," is a bop through and through. There's awesome 80's synths, workout video drums, a powerfully belted chorus, and somewhere in there is definitely a cowbell. That this is just the glimmering façade over a much more serious subject--that maybe the reason you're always the one making mistakes in a relationship is because you're the only one trying--only adds to Mitski's greatness: even her façades are better than most other musicians' whole catalogs.
On to my current obsession: "Love Me More." An absolute banger of a pop song where Mitski parallels the damaging dependency of a doomed relationship to that of the isolation she feels as an artist, growing ever-distant from her fans and her love of music. And her message is not subtle: "But when I'm done singing this song / I will have to find something else to keep me here." She pleads achingly to fans and literal music over powerful synths in the chorus, begging the art form she loves so much: "I need you to love me more / Love me more, love me more / Love enough to drown it out / Drown it out, drown me out." If Bo Burnham's Inside taught us anything, it's that art is a harsh mistress.
An aside: when I heard this song in the context of the album, I'm embarrassed to say, I cried. I wept like a child. Strangely, it wasn't out of any sadness in my life, but instead the opposite. This album is so fantastically brilliant that I wept out of sheer awe for the experience. To be in the presence of an album like this is maybe...MAYBE, once in a lifetime. I don't know if there will be another.
"There's Nothing Left for You Here," begins with a 10CC-esque synth rhythm to complement Mitski's song of being left utterly alone, be that from a lost partner, or a loss of love with music. "So go on to that sweetheart's door / And find a new you / Give her all the love you saved for it." The music crescendos and swells to a monumental leviathan of strings and percussion while Mitski belts out "You could touch fire / You could fly / It was your right / It was your life," when everything suddenly cuts. "And then it passed."
"Should've Been Me" finds Mitski at her most Bowie-worshipping (and, I mean, who hasn't been there). The metallic percussion hits, hand claps, and fake-yet-very-real piano sounds recall the god's tragically overlooked 1993 masterpiece Black Tie White Noise, particularly "Miracle Goodnight," a romp around the dancehall that, like Mitski after him, hides its message under a party guise. "When I saw the girl looked just like me / I thought, it must be lonely loving someone / Trying to find their way out of a maze," Mitski happily sings along to the honky-tonk beat, hiding her own shame about letting a relationship fall apart when the other person so obviously wanted to make it work.
And so we return to where we started, "I Guess." This may be the saddest break up song I've ever heard. The piano and synths here are reverberated so heavily as to fill every aural space, crushing you under their melancholy, and forcing you to focus on Mitski's cooing voice as your only source of orientation. But her message is not one for the faint of heart. "If I could keep anything of you / I would keep just this quiet after you / It's still as a pond I'm staring into / From here I can say, 'Thank you.'" The lifetime together now fully ended, and the drone of the keys fading leaves you behind to sit and regret everything.
Closer "That's Our Lamp" (amazing title by the way) is quite the culture shock moment, starting with a toe-tapping synth sample and bass drum, before Mitski begins to describe the final fight that precipitated this whole uncoupling saga. When she gets to the chorus, we explode into full-blown Dolly Parton "9 to 5"-ing, including strumming guitars, tambourines, and...there's that cowbell again! "That's our lamp / It shines like a big moon / We may be ending / I'm standing in the dark / Looking up into our room / Where you'll be waiting for me / Thinking that's where you loved me," Mitski triumphantly sings as sound adds upon sound--percussion, a foot-stomping chorus, trumpets, and so much more--until the song becomes a Mardi Gras parade. Mitski and the chorus of singers belt out "That's where you loved me" over and over as we fade out on the end of a utterly mesmerizing story of heartbreak and rebuilding.
TL;DR: 10/10 Would cry dancing again
