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Sometimes when I listen to music, I want to run an emotional marathon.
I blocked out a whole afternoon last week in anticipation of Amanda Palmer’s latest cabaret piano carnival slam. There Will Be No Intermission lays bare the brutal, throat-ripping pain of a woman living under the patriarchy. She’s written so many songs about abortion I’ve lost count, and they all slap so dang hard.
Every few months I strap in for an evening diving once again into the soundtrack to the original Star Wars film, a sweeping epic truly worthy of the epithet — John Williams’ terrifying fluency in tightly-wound leitmotif fractals thrills, even forty years later.
And I still have made zero progress in deciphering Car Seat Headrest’s dripping, meaty cardigan-rock opus Twin Fantasy, which took out the bronze in last year’s top ten. My kingdom for a steak knife.
But sometimes, I am not in the mood for a manifesto.
Sometimes a statement will do nicely.
“Here I am with arms unfolding /
I guess it isn’t quite the end”
A hush falls over Dodie Clark’s latest EP.
Textually: self-effacing and shyly optimistic. Tonally: delicate and insular; soft keys and homespun percussion and twee analogue beep-boops. The arrangements: not like pages in a book to be leafed through sequentially, nor thorns on a bush to prick and prod and draw hot blood, but flowers in a vase.
Each crisp syllable is barely more than a sigh of summer breeze, clipped even shorter by her cut-glass accent. Loud can demand attention all it likes, but quiet can coax you closer.
(Sidebar: does anyone else think it’s totally bizarre how a vast majority of anglophone singers adopt an American accent while singing? As if English-language pop culture doesn’t already pay enough obeisance to the land of the free and the home of the brave. End sidebar. As you were.)
There’s something of the quirky rom-com protagonist about Dodie: bug-eyed spectacles framing big brown eyes, her buffed-to-a-sheen personality a mercurial mix of introverted and outgoing. But it’s clear, even from an EP that doesn’t crack half and hour, that she is more than smart enough to lean into the character. On ‘She’:
“She smells like lemongrass and sleep /
She tastes like apple juice and peach”
Clichés are clichés for a reason, after all, and the song’s final chorus is as predictable as it is affecting:
“But to her /
I taste of nothing at all”
A clean white vase perches on the kitchen windowsill among an electic selection of potted succulents. The morning light streams past, illuminating tasteful monochrome fixtures in a Pinterest-perfect kitchen. Hot coffee waits for you in a steaming mug. As does Dodie, idly plinking on a ukulele, soaking up the sun.