Album Review: Abysskiss by Adrianne Lenker

Adrianne Lenker dies within two minutes of her solo record abysskiss. It is not a dramatic passing. Over feather-light fingerpicking, she simply sings, "See my death become a trail/And the trail leads to a flower." Her voice is sweet, the tone muted, nothing but her breath and guitar strings. The transformation sounds peaceful, maybe even a relief, a dispersing of stored energies.

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In the two preceding years, Big Thief have released a couple of adored albums, and toured behind them pretty much non-stop well up into the middle of 2018. It's surprising then that both Buck Meek and now Adrianne Lenker have both put out solo albums in 2018; Meek in fact took some time out of Big Thief in order to complete his self-titled record, but for Lenker the last few years have been a non-stop whirlwind in which she snatched moments to write and record abysskiss. This relentless activity actually seems to have been advantageous to Lenker in creating abysskiss, as the perpetual motion of her moods is woven into the very fabric of these delicate but powerful songs.

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How does folk music pacify the way it does? All it is is centrally a combination of a guitar and a voice. Actor Sam Elliott's character makes the fundamental observation in the 2018 remake of A Star is Born that, "Music is essentially 12 notes between any octave.... It's the same story told over and over. All any artist can offer the world is how they see those 12 notes." By that standard, Adrianne Lenker is simply performing the same role as all the other singers who've ever picked up a guitar to tell their story.

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As frontwoman of Big Thief, Adrianne Lenker weaves gorgeous, folky tales, fleshed out by subtle flecks of guitar, bass and drums by her bandmates. 'abyskiss', her new solo album, does away with the embellishments. The record almost entirely just features her fiddly, intricate acoustic guitar work and wonderfully distinctive vocal, allowing her stories to worm their way into your consciousness immediately.

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Following her band Big Thief's second LP, Capacity, by a little over a year, 2018's Abysskiss is Adrianne Lenker's second solo album for Saddle Creek since joining their roster in 2014. It stylizes its title and track names in lower-case lettering, an appropriate signal of the intimacy to come on an album that speaks softly but with emotional potency. It was recorded in a week with producer Luke Temple (Here We Go Magic, Art Feynman), much of whose solo music could be described the same way.

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For Lenker, though, nature's ability to intimidate is something in which to revel. To her, nature and the questions it poses - "why does the sun rise and set?", "why does the river run to the sea?" - represent the abyss, while our experiences of those things represent our human connection to it, quite literally us kissing the abyss, hence 'abysskiss.' In ten aptly small songs Adrianne evokes our ability to vanish at the feet of nature, creating a black hole all of her own that's both comforting and suffocating. Lenker creates this cocoon-like soundscape with little more than her voice and a guitar, though a rogue keyboard does appear on lead single "Cradle".

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Not enough people talk about how damn prolific Adrianne Lenker is. The singer-songwriter's sombre, plaintive folk rock tunes propelled her band Big Thief to indie stardom with the one-two punch of albums Masterpiece and Capacity, in 2016 and 2017 respectively, and a quick Google search can find several other projects and loosies stretching back only a few years. So the existence of abysskiss, her latest record under her own name, should be no surprise, and neither should its quality.   The songs of Big Thief aren't particularly ornate ….

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