MITSKI - Puberty 2

For Mitski Miyawaki, happiness and sadness aren't such distant emotions. Perhaps they're not even different emotions at all, but two separate manifestations of a single force that strikes without mercy and leaves behind after-effects that are hard to shake off. An overstatement? Judging by the way the nearly twenty-six-year-old Japanese-American singer-songwriter (a geographical detail that's far from trivial) portrays happiness on the opening "Happy" — in the guise of a reassuring-sounding boy who nonetheless abandons the protagonist right after an orgasm — there's very little exaggeration in such a claim. After all, the writer's lyrics, right from the start of her career (astonishing, given how long it's taken — considering how her relative breakthrough only arrived with her fourth album), have never been easy: marked by tearing contrasts, identity crises, destructive urges and far-from-uplifting imagery, Mitski's lyrical output probes the deepest recesses of the soul with surgical precision, laying bare the anger, the insecurities, the passage into an adulthood still perceived as something distant, not entirely tangible.

A second puberty, in short, as the album's title rightly suggests, with all the underlying uncertainties and obstacles to face, rent to pay, dreams to fulfil: with no filters, with the utter honesty of her urge to tell her own story, Miyawaki crafts one of the finest personal diaries of recent times, placing her light years above the tedious whining of so many slacker-writers who've emerged lately. But beyond its verbal charge, "Puberty 2" has quite a lot more going for it.

It's undoubtedly the sense of narrative urgency, the force with which it shatters every form of restraint and reticence, that sets the pace, deeply influencing not only how the music and the writing manifest themselves, but also how they're positioned within the same tracklist. This is a method the artist has carried with her from the start, one that on the previous "Bury Me At Makeout Creek" reached a personal peak in terms of abrasiveness and lyrical starkness. On the new record, still bent on condensing ideas into the shortest possible time, the process nonetheless gains a certain "refinement," revealing a new compositional awareness in Mitski, who plays with her voice and the instruments at her disposal like never before. Many more nuances and subtleties, in other words: even at the cost of sacrificing the melodic payoff of some tracks (not always striking on that front), Miyawaki deepens her distinctive authorial vision, enriching the lo-fi rock blend of her earlier work with plenty of new possibilities, here exploited across their full expressive spectrum.

Where "Your Best American Girl" addresses cultural rifts and a sense of belonging with the force of a full-throated chorus and gloriously explosive guitars — building a track that wouldn't have been out of place for Liz Phair — "Fireworks" doesn't hesitate to adapt a pop-punk-flavoured melodic line while stripping it almost entirely of rhythmic support, replaced instead by a sinister keyboard backdrop, in stark contrast to the vocal line above it. It's precisely in these small adjustments, in the sonic oddities that Mitski and her producer (and sole collaborator) Patrick Hyland scatter throughout the record, that the expressive success of "Puberty 2" is built. The sophisti-pop-tinged saxophones of the aforementioned "Happy" breaking up the industrial stride of the electronic backing, the slow, almost imperceptible climax of "Thursday Girl," buoyed by the atmospheric candor of the keyboards, the psych-punk vehemence of "My Body's Made Of Crushing Little Stars," with its distorted, chewed-over guitars simulating the hallucinated ravings of early Azalia Snail: even where it's just a sonic fragment (the drum cut of "A Loving Feeling"), it's the power of the gesture that lingers in the memory, Miyawaki's ambition, the way she manages to set her own vulnerability to music, almost with pride, managing to offset the rough edges and, above all, to lay the groundwork for exciting new developments.

The straightforwardness of the closing "A Burning Hell," in which all of Mitski's desire to finally put an end to her emotional torments and learn to love "some little things" comes through, following the remarkable "Crack Baby" — a St. Vincent-style rock ballad in which considerable importance is given to the spatiality of the synths (with an interesting ambient coda) — speaks of an artist for whom the indie-rock label, at least as it's currently understood, feels rather too tight, of a musician whose journey has yet to reach its final destination. With just a touch more attention to the songwriting, there's no doubt that next time around sparks will fly: we're certain Mitski still has a great deal left to tell.

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21/09/2016