Swift combines the soft folk sound of “willow” with some of her country and Americana roots in “no body, no crime,” drawing us in once again. Evermore cuts through the delicate ice of Folklore: it is the color to Folklore’s black and white. The setting matches the sound: they play in an album in the middle of the woods, cozy and hidden from the snow. This magical feeling was amplified by her release of The Long Pond Studio Sessions, a film in which Swift, Jack Antonoff, and Aaron Dessner finally play the album together for the first time after recording it entirely remotely. Swift tells winding stories of love, hardship, and mystery and tenderly walks us through the forest of her imagination. Listening to Folklore feels like visiting a cabin in the woods, with a fireplace well lit. She created the 2020 we all wish we experienced: soft, sweet, and gentle.
She begins “the 1” by stating “I’m doin good, I’m on some new shit,” and that says a lot about the album as a whole. Taylor Swift… can even be said? Somehow, while we all sat on our couches in quarantine, this woman created not one but two musical masterpieces. No album touched my heart this year in the way that “Saturn Return” did. When I think of this album, I think of the cross-country drive I took at the beginning of the pandemic to make my way home and the happy moments that can be found in darkness.
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In reading more on the record, this seems to have been the point: they say, “this album is a reflection of us coming to terms with how to find our power in the face of an unfair world… our hope is that women can feel less alone in their journey through the modern world.” There is something in the caramel-thick sweetness of these sisters’ voices that makes a listener feel as though they’ve been bewitched into calm. The soft, soulful, lullaby of “Healer in the Sky” pulled me through the pain of the first month of quarantine and soothed me as the world was turned upside down. I made no mistake here: this record blew me away. In February, I was staying with a friend in Nashville and she mentioned them as a local favorite, and when I stopped at Grimey’s to shop for records I came upon a signed copy of “Saturn Return.” I had never heard the Secret Sisters before, but there is nobody I trust more to recommend music than this Nashville friend of mine, so I bought it. By adding layers of shoegaze guitars, synths and the aggression of '70s proto-metal results in a soupy stew of noise which although can be a bit much at times, it’s an intoxicating listen.As soon as I saw “Water Witch, featuring Brandi Carlile” on this tracklist I knew that the Secret Sisters would be a favorite of 2020. Taking the atmospherics of prog and the propulsion of krautrock is pretty much just channeling the early works of Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Can, the inventors of that sound.
"an Bat None" is another example of how you can make something beautiful from chaos and make it sound cathartic, the introduction of a swirling rave synth chord adds another layer of delirious discord.Īn aggressive shift in sound is achieved by stripping everything back to just synth and percussion, on "Mir Inoi", a weirdo space jam which sounds like a lost track by prog legends King Crimson, while the synth solos of instrumental "Hypnogram" modernizes the freak-out music of Amon Düül to brilliant effect, here they are firmly stuck in a mid-seventies' prog vortex. "Welcome Blue Valkyrie" slows the pace a little but ferocity levels remain high, the multiple layers sound like dozens of guitars all sync’d while playing slightly differently, the intensification is enveloping.
The three-minute slow build of angular guitar, swathes of synths and trudging hip-hop beats of "Psionic State" dramatically speed up before exploding into a thrilling piece of kosmische tension using the calm vs chaos, quiet/loud/quiet technique created by Pixies, as an opener it screams out for attention, and throughout Polysomn it’s made inherently clear this isn’t background music. Vocals are reverbed so much the distant sound of them acts as instrumentation, and the album excels when there's no vocals at all as then you can truly appreciate the sheer noise they're capable of. Chile's Föllakzoid stay firmly in the electronic area, while France's Slift and fellow Finlanders K-X-P re-model the grind of Hawkwind and Black Sabbath, on their third album, Kairon IRSE! go for the jugular by making an almighty racket which channels My Bloody Valentine in their noisiest moments as much as the mechanic percussion of Can.
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