SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: JULIA HOLTER – SOMETHING IN THE ROOM SHE MOVES

JULIA HOLTER
SOMETHING IN THE ROOM SHE MOVES
DOMINO

In one of her most straight-up pop hits, “Feel You”, Julia Holter sang: “The time change worked well/I had a good excuse for being late”. Well, six years of waiting for the next, also sixth, solo record is not so much if this time was used for reconsidering and reinventing — or may I put it in a more IT way, updating and rebooting — one’s music. Short spoiler: yes, it was.

A long time ago, in far, far 2015, when the air was clearer, glaciers were stronger, and democracy was younger, almost all music critics agreed that on her then newly arrived Have You In My Wilderness, Holter finally found her perfect sound by connecting her eagerness for experiments with her “most accessible” pop sonics to date. That was before Aviary. In 2018, by releasing this cumbersome and sometimes overly reliant on experiments 90-min epic, full of flirting with Japanese avant-garde and modern classical, she ran to the Moon (in another world) away from the pop dance floor and divided music writers into adoring ones and those who anticipated her return to more mainstream material. Last year, with her symphonic operetta Behind the Wallpaper featured Spektral Quartet, which was quite unique within the indie realm, she finished off any chitchat about another Joanna Newsom/Caroline Polachek baroque pop turn.

Well, almost a decade later, Holter comes back to what we might call the middle-ground between her most successful pop attempts and constant thirst for Björk-inspired, Lucrecia Dalt-laden experiments. Instead of going deeper into lengthy and vague landscapes of sparse sound, she has cut off everything redundant and got an extremely solid, consistent, and well-crafted piece of art. Which is inspired, as usual with Holter, by another masterpiece, Hayao Miyazaki’s film Ponyo, and illustrated by maybe the best work of Los Angeles artist Christina Quarles on the cover. As Holter says, she has tried to make it sound “waterlike, fluid”, which matches the topic of the main source of her inspiration. Mostly, this concept, with the help of Peter Gabriel-like prog elements, Talk Talk-soaked post-rock vignettes, swirled noir-ish brass, and her weightless vocals, works perfectly well, adding smoothness and plasticity to the album. Yet, some of these ethereal praxes don’t connect together convincingly.

Something in the Room She Moves is conceptually structured as a record with day and night sides, or acts, if you will. Beginning with “Sun Girl”, warming up right from the go, and slowly awakening “These Morning”, she transitions to the title tune “Something in the Room She Moves” with touches of Jethro Tull-esque flute and French chanson, and so on to the night part. It would be too imprudent to say that this is another mainstream record of hers because, despite apparent simplicity, Holter doesn’t make this journey easier. She constantly reminds listeners that the listening process is not necessarily a serene pleasure. Her songs often freeze, ruminate, and switch from one rhythm to another right in the epicenter of catharsis (“Sun Girl”) like Travis Scott’s “Sicko Mode”, delivering totally different moods. Midway through, the whole album features an almost six-min interlude with a slow-burning and theatrically introspective dirge “Meyou”, just to hit after that with a standout “Spinning”.

Sometimes this whole boat, that rocked, stumbles upon average ambient pieces like “Ocean” that we hear every day in airports or indie games, for one, Jusant, and that looks out of place among other so detailed and intricate parts of the record. However, as Eugene O’Neill might put it, Holter makes this floating long day’s journey into night with placid grace and dignity. This is a really decent excuse for being a bit late.

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