#devra hoff

[sinceileftyoublog]

Julia Holter Album Review: Something in the Room She Moves

(Domino)

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Over the past decade and a half, Julia Holter has consistently made left turns. From the drones and baroque stylings of her 2011 debut Tragedy and 2012 breakout Ekstasis, to the urban, Hollywood, oceanside chamber pop of first Domino entrants Loud City Song and Have You in My Wilderness, to the epic experimentalism of 2018 opus Aviary, Holter has found ways to shift the focus of her sonic explorations and focused curiosities, all while maintaining a cohesive artistic voice. Her 6th album, March's Something in the Room She Moves, continues Holter's penchant for malleability, though more than any of her previous albums, it exudes an air of spontaneity. During COVID, just beforehand having had to focus on film score work, Holter experienced a bout of writer's block--understandably so, as she gave birth to her daughter in 2020 and wasn't able to consistently take in her usual cures of books and films. Instead, she overcame her stasis through a mix of what was right in front of her and her imagination. The songs on Something in the Room She Moves cull from Holter's perspectives and observations, stemming from experiences watching Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo with her daughter and devouring Peter Jackson's Get Back documentary about The Beatles. But they also dare to dive into the corporeal, evoking sounds from inside the body and mind, filtered through a surreal lens.

Listening to Something in the Room She Moves, you feel that Holter wished to encapsulate a childlike spirit but was careful to avoid the pretense of forcing too much chaos into the songs. Opening track "Sun Girl" does start like you've been dropped in the middle of the it, amidst clattering percussion, and introduces a smorgasbord of instrumentation, such as Devra Hoff's fretless bass, Tashi Wada's bagpipes, and Sonjia Denise Hubert Harper's picolo and flute. It's removed from the pop of Holter's previous records, but it moves with some discernible structure, consistent in its tempo changes, vocal layering, and arpeggios. "Place me, drag me, move me, Sun Girl," Holter sings, instructional text as if to remind the listener that this isn't someone randomly banging away at instruments. Like the best surrealist paintings, or even an unintentionally humorous mistranslation, Something in the Room She Moves always has one or two moments at a time that are off-kilter, made all the more eerie by the order around them.

The album's abnormal quality extends into Holter's lyrics and song titles, too, as she subverts traditional grammar. "These morning get sunrise / Tall fjord, some time lost / Brush aside any words sinking to the abyss ago," she sings on "These Morning". The record title itself, which Holter came up with as a play on the first line of The Beatles' "Something", adheres to sentence compositional rules but is only sensible from an emotional, not physical, denotation; a line on the title track clarifies that Holter does, indeed, mean for the wordplay to be uncanny: "Then standing there he said / I love the way you move / When you move the time line." At the same time, Holter's vocals do move, her melisma traveling along with the song's woodwind instruments as the track builds up in volume. And to the best of her ability, she messes with your linear sense of time. Songs like the title track, "Spinning", and "Talking to a Whisper" dip to the point where you think they're going to end, but they shoot back up. Minimal vocal exercises like "Materia" and "Meyou" toy with divergence. On the former, Holter sings, "Of love it's a matter of / Of love it's a matter of love," an imperfect circle of a verse. The latter harks back to Holter's Meredith Monk-esque ambient days, the chorus of voices repeating "me" and "you" together acting as a pulsating instrument. It's as jarring to hear for the first time as it was to hear the same Holter who released Tragedy and Ekstasis cover "Hello Stranger".

Something in the Room She Moves is not a concept record, about the body, the technological, childhood, parenthood, or anything else. Instead, it explores those concepts effortlessly and with a sense of self awareness. On the song meant to invoke the hormone oxytocin--called, yes, "Evening Mood"--Wada plays a spacey, almost video game-esque melody before the song takes a turn for the sensual. Elizabeth Goodfellow's mallet drums buoy a bossa nova-like sway, along with Hoff's bendy bass and Chris Speed's jazzy clarinet, and Holter layers her vocals and looks inward: "I was not alone / Thinking how I could wrap / My arms all around / My face, my face / My girl, my girl," she sings. Later on, she recalls, "Daylight hits me / I was not alone / Equinox hide in a beam." She's given us an album where the cosmically impossible seems captivatingly real, where we're better able to understand ourselves and the world by coming to terms with the intangible aspects of our points of view.