Parks and a fine creation
REVIEW Arlo Parks Collapsed In Sunbeams (Transgressive) ★★★★✩
There’s been a whole slew of artists who sound a lot like Arlo Parks in the last few years. Serious, introspective young women whose creative backgrounds centre more on poetry than pop, and who turn up at Brighton’s The Great Escape festival of new music – where Parks herself made her live debut in 2019 – to deliver an earnest and usually forgettable set.
So why is Parks so instantly and refreshingly different? Of a type, yet unmistakably apart from it? Maybe it’s straight-up talent and charisma; the ‘it’ some performers possess that others don’t. Yet attributing everything to ‘it’ would be to diminish the evident craft that has gone into her debut album.
For all that these songs give off an appealing air of naivety, there is a sure hand behind them. She knows what she’s doing, and that seeming artlessness is very much an artistic choice.
Collapsed In Sunbeams presents itself as a series of aural snapshots from a teenage life, candidly shot in the moment. And a great deal of skill has gone into their composition to make them appear that way. They feel immediate, credible and natural, seldom overelaborate, with a telling lack of lyrical gaucheness. She really knows how to tell a story. In sound, her relaxedfit bedroom pop lands somewhere between Kate Tempest (minus the intensity and structural intricacy) and Lily Allen (minus, thank heavens, the codstreet mannerisms).
It’s easy to picture her hitting as big as either, and it would be no less than she deserves. This isn’t just a debut of promise, it’s a finely pitched work of substance.