Review: Julia Holter - Something in the Room She Moves (2024)

    
    these morning running on wet stone and without so many parties clamoring 
    through both our heads these french guy reaches to wipe his hot chocolate 
    off my left boot exacting blue and 
    spared imparable c’est pas grave.
    
    anything with a centre is perfect. 
    these is theses only if there were absolutely 
    anything yellow about it, and because that would be a kind of light 
    visible only on staircases. 
    (my feet are still in the garden if there’s 
    anything i know.) 
    AVIARY was the kingdom of God: AVIARY brought the stars outside. 
    it was a decembery october. this is an aprily march 
    and at making certain pieces of dust approachable 
    (this is grandeur==============
    This is the perfect sphere!) it’s no big secret that i find AVIARY 
    among the great triumphs of copernican history and that the wake 
    of each resonance on-it sends sending over the whole forever but 
    yes that was already a startling number of years ago now and the sun 
    is still burning as far as any of us knows and 
    anyway there’s only so many flooring things ‘In Gardens’ Muteness’ 
    can do before being understood by painters as the floor. Ok. 
    
    Something in the Room sprouts from floors, hats like a tropics, 
    and leaves the lemon in its shell, almost— 
    its scale is not of the absolute mysterium but of 
    having wept very slightly slowly past the upright piano 
    while gathering dishes from the backyard, 
    and while this movement does involve certain scriptural 
    or otherwise pelagic detours (beginning with the dissonant game 
    played in the glade at the midpoint of ‘Sun Girl’), 
    these have to do mostly with communities of creatures 
    whose feathers are substantive, 
    yes, 
    but with tact and a certain archaeological rhythm. 
    
    These are not telescopic observations. 
    (memory mistaken for what's 
    here right now.) 
    anything with depth is an answer and anything 
    with an answer and a frequency is a fish leaping 
    to vacate the velveteen fabrics of deliberation; 
    
    anything is in the night with articles. 
    
    Julia Holter is a millennial. 
    
    and she is a summery and compassionate friend
    to the upright bass. and her electric piano 
    has hardly sounded so consequential as when 
    glinting from the constellation of ‘Materia,’ 
    which recalls the tenderest subtleties of Loud City Song just as 
    the previous track’s chorus dropped carefully back into 
    the earliest mornings of Have You In My Wilderness. 
    And the synthesizers oh yes so tremendously 80s! 
    among the delicious machinery of ‘Spinning,’ 
    along both the deepest and corniest frothings of
    ‘Ocean’! take that, brilliant trees! but really 
    it must be the diptych of 'Evening Mood’ and ‘Talking to the Whisper,’ 
    i think here's definitive breath, 
    the former sending splashes of lightning-bugs across every former campfire        
    and paintbrush jar in the whole warm world, the latter beginning to plod 
    in silky noir (charmingly DAWish reverb on its drums) before eventually 
    romancing outward into a single or multiple mode of flight 
    (this waking that and fireworking) 
    for the overhead ecstasy which perches, 
    wavers and chambersome, 
    (the blinds the lamp were as we left it, rises on 
    bright lines in my left boot pas grave pas grave) 
    atop our gracious return to sleep. 
    larkhood is a setting, any light 
    can switch on and shine on
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    

as seen in shortwave spring 24