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Oct 22, 2020It’s excruciating in its honesty – even for Lenker, who’s hardly known for shying away from her feelings. Now she bares her pain with complete abandon. It’s quite extraordinary.
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Oct 26, 2020songs is Lenker’s most complete, her most personal work; her least comprehensible, but her most comprehensive.
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Oct 22, 2020‘songs’ feels like unearthing an old puzzle a piece at a time. ‘instrumentals’, while texturally the same, focuses on pure ambience – the unspecific title is far more deserving. If anything, this feels more like a companion piece, a window into that cabin rather than its own separate record. If you wish you had been there, this is the best way to feel like you were.
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Oct 21, 2020Lenker's work continues to reimagine love and loss, and albums like songs are her way of turning those complex emotions into something timeless.
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Oct 21, 2020Instrumentals is an album which is both easy to understate and overstate. ... By ingeniously pairing this music with the straightforward Songs, Lenker paints them as two pieces of a whole, two completely different recordings of the same state of mind.
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Oct 23, 2020Some of these songs are as lovely as any Lenker has ever written: lush and verdant, chords fanning out like ferns, their major-key tonalities at odds with the heartbreak at the album’s core.. ... A collage of these recordings comprises instrumentals’ two songs, “music for indigo” and “mostly chimes,” which together run more than 37 minutes. They are not showy pieces, but the depth of her relationship with her instrument is clear.
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Nov 19, 2020These tracks are among Lenker’s most striking and emotionally nuanced. While it lacks the musical dynamism of abysskiss, songs’ lyrics are more potent and detailed.
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Oct 26, 2020This resilience against the facts of life wavers from song to song, giving us a divine spectrum of her fragile existence at the time of their creation. ... It’s in the final three tracks of songs where the membrane between songwriter and broken-hearted woman is at its thinnest, where Lenker renders her deep, soulful ache in the most poignant of ways.
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Oct 30, 2020Painful memories are twirling around in Lenker’s head on Songs. It’s an album that lives up to it’s name by capturing the basic, natural truth of her art.
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Oct 28, 2020The sparse palette - Lenker’s acoustic, incidental percussion, reassuring tape hiss - serves to isolate the quiet brilliance of the melodies, setting their winding, spontaneous beauty against angst that spans existential questioning and the nuts and bolts of severing ties with someone you care about.
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Oct 26, 2020The Instrumentals album is naturally a looser, less magnified affair, consisting of collages of the exploratory, freeform acoustic guitar improvisations that each day of the recording sessions would begin with. They showcase a different side to her creative process, but it’s undoubtedly on Songs where the emotional impact is located.
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Oct 23, 2020In itself songs is a soft companion to Big Thief’s two albums from 2019 and an album that effortlessly captures the aimless desperation of quarantine. It’s not so much that this work pales in comparison to the work with her band, even considering their outsized reputation; it’s more that Lenker achieves something completely different on her solo albums. songs like abysskiss provides insight and context to the broad beauty of Big Thief, and when being herself, Lenker proves successful.
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Oct 23, 2020Clearly, songs is the more developed album of the pairing here and one that those already under Lenker’s spell will treasure and contrast to her earlier work.
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Oct 21, 2020On instrumentals, Lenker settles down from songs' busier thoughts, indulging in the stoicism within to achieve moments of serenity, if only briefly. Deep breaths, everyone.
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Oct 21, 2020Her lyrics and voice remain major draws. ... Soothing balms following the drama of Songs. [Nov 2020, p.26]
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Oct 21, 2020With ‘Songs’ and ‘Instrumentals’ – the first comprised of acoustic singer-songwriter ditties, the latter a musical sound collage with no vocals – Lenker fashioned timeless, tender snapshots of grief that are grounded in healing.
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Oct 27, 2020Making the transition from Songs into Instrumentals is more of a listening challenge than one might imagine. While both albums are populated by the same radiant guitar tone, the playing on Instrumentals is much more exploratory and tentative, dotted with hesitations, pinging harmonics, string buzz and misarticulated notes.
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Oct 22, 2020While not an essential album for fans of Big Thief, admirers of Lenker's solo work will find another reliably solid, touching set of songs here, and the instrumentals may offer ambient comfort for late, late nights or the sequestered.
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MojoOct 21, 2020Songs draws itself into clearer focus through Lenker's sweet, freshly-cut voice. [Nov 2020, p.83]
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 26 out of 31
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Mixed: 4 out of 31
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Negative: 1 out of 31
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Nov 2, 2020Painstakingly beautiful, Adrianne's song writing is vivid as she hones in a journey through grief and love.
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Mar 15, 2022A beautiful collection of songs, which contains some of my favourite songs released within the last decade.
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Feb 12, 2022This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.