Making beauty out of a mess
That deep hole that Memphis singer- songwriter Julien Baker started to dig when she was still a teenager on her 2015 solo debut, “Sprained Ankle”? It gets wider and deeper on “Turn Out the Lights” ( Matador), an album that turns its predecessor’s intimacy into something far more ambitious.
Though the record is still basically the work of a onewoman band, centered on Baker’s voice and guitar, it widens the production scope. String arrangements, reed instruments, multitracked vocals and Baker’s piano give the music a chamber- pop veneer, which allows for a greater dynamic range. Like all the best anthem writers, Baker knows how to build to a knockout punch.
There’s little middle ground in lyrics that work at emotional extremes. Narrators wrestle with paralyzing loneliness, despair and death. Yet Baker’s not crafting suicide notes. She’s trying to make something beautiful out of the mess. In the spirit of the best emo bands, sometimes it can feel great to turn the heaviness into a chorus that can be hurled from a rooftop.
“Appointments” maps out the album. A meditative intro unfurls with a series of little accents — a piano chord here, a wordless harmony vocal choir there — until it reaches its climactic lines. Baker unloads: “I know that it’s not gonna turn out all right, but I have to believe that it is.”
In a sense, Baker writes music that’s like an uncomfortable confrontation with the person who is making life more painful for you. In the title track, that person turns out to be Baker herself.
“I just wanted to go to sleep,” Baker sings. “But when I turn out the lights … there is no one left between myself and me,” as a surging arrangement brings an avalanche of guitar chords down on her head.
After that peak moment, the album settles into a smaller space as defined by the self- loathing and folk guitars of “Shadowboxing” and “Even.” In the harrowing “Sour Breath,” the frustration becomes almost too much: “The harder I swim, the faster I sink,” she repeats. But there’s a ferocity in her singing that suggests she’s not giving up.
Sometimes that message comes across subtly. Baker’s piano on “Hurt Less” is something like a small smile of self- belief, affirmed by a lyric about a seemingly routine matter. In the song, the narrator finally allows herself to not only think about the future but care enough about it to imagine herself in it.