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HOEGSISTERS FIND THEIR VOICE
Gifted sibling country duo team with Brandi
Carlile for an excellent LP By JONATHAN BERNSTEINGRIMES
Grimes has become notorious for her
provocative online persona: Despite being
an outspoken feminist, she’s decried “cancel
culture” and made remarks that have been
called transphobic. Twitter went code red
in 2018 when she and tech mogul Elon Musk
confirmed their relationship, and she recently
announced that she was expecting her first
child through a nearly naked, hyperreal
Instagram photo.
Grimes’ latest LP, Miss Anthropocene,
is her most high-concept record to date.
According to her, Miss Anthropocene is a
supervillian: climate change personified
as a malevolent goddess. Appropriately,
the music inside is a primordial ooze, the
sound of existence eating itself. Poisoned
smog seeps through the air on tracks like the
six-minute opener, “So Heavy I Fell Through
the Earth.” On “Violence,” Grimes (or her
fictional antihero) takes a sadomasochistic
approach to human exploitation of the plan-
et’s resources, taunting, “I’m, like, begging
for it, baby/Makes you wanna party, wanna
wake up/Baby, it’s violence.” On “My Name
Is Darkness,” she sings, “You know me as the
girl who plays with fire/But this is the song I
wrote you in the dark,” describing “imminent
annihilation” as “so dope.”
The album’s genuinely innovative high
point, “4ÆM,” opens with a tropical collage
of sounds, then twists a late-night come-on
into a “Ride of the Valkyries”–like battle
hymn, built around a vocal sample from the
Bollywood film Bajirao Mastani.
Yet, even as she indulges in images of a
world on fire like a cyberpunk Nero, many
moments on Miss Anthropocene suggest
Grimes’ real-life concerns are more inward-
facing. The semiacoustic “Delete Forever”
delivers a halfhearted apology for her online
antics. By the album’s end, she’s abandoned
her muddled sci-fi concept altogether in favor
of a utopian fantasy. “We could play a
beautiful game/You could chase me down/In
the name of love!” she sings ecstatically on
“IDORU,” over bird calls and shimmering keys.
Pretending you can transcend the apocalypse
seems fitting coming from someone who says
she wants to sell her soul to AI when the going
gets tough. Unfortunately, the rest of us aren’t
lucky enough to have that option.
hardships, delivered with
tender intimacy. Carlile is
back for Saturn Return, a
spare, gorgeous, relatably
realistic set. “Late bloomers
on parade” is how the group
put it on the Elton John-
meets-Dusty Springfield
declaration “Late Bloomer.”T
HE FOURTH ALBUM
from Alabama sibling
duo the Secret Sisters
is the stunning country-soul
opus their talent has always
promised. Laura and Lydia
Rogers have been at it since
2010, making solid LPs
with high-profile producers
(T Bone Burnett, Dave Cobb)
while lending their Southernchurch harmonies to legends
like Willie Nelson and Elvis
Costello. In 2017, the pair
enlisted singer-songwriter
Brandi Carlile to co-produce
their third LP, You Don’t
Own Me Anymore, helping
them up their game in a set
of songs about piloting life’sThat well-chosen sentiment is
truth in advertising.
Carlile and Jacob Hoffman’s
supple piano playing lend a
warmth that complements
the Rogers’ dexterous vocals.
The duo don’t sugarcoat
their litany of career chal-
lenges: “It’s not glamour,
it ain’t fortune,” they sing
in note-perfect unison on
“Nowhere, Baby.” Yet, they
sound more comfortable
than ever throughout this
elegantly sparse collection,
singing solo leads for the first
time, coming together with
heartening beauty on the
songs’ choruses.
The record taps the
melting-pot influences native
to their hometown of Muscle
Shoals, from hymnal ballads
like “Tin Can Angel” and
“Hold You Dear” to the Joan
Baez-like noir folk of “Fair.”
They honor vintage sounds,
but also play with them: “Sil-
ver” feels like a 17th- century-
style English ballad, telling
the tale of a woman who
realizes she’s going gray, but
what feels like a lament soon
becomes a speedy roots rock-
er with a winking defiance
against the stigma of aging.
A tension between
Southern gothic darkness
and churchy salvation has
always simmered beneath the
surface of the Sisters’ music.
Here it feels like that fault line
might erupt, as they segue
from bluesy rage (“Cabin,”
inspired by the Brett Kava-
naugh hearings) to dreamy
retro-pop pastiche (“Hand
Over My Heart”).
The effortlessness with
which the Secret Sisters
articulate their musical
ambitions places Saturn
Return among recent
country-roots gems from
songwriters like Jason Isbell
and Pistol Annies. If working
through their struggles has
been a strange process, the
wait was more than worth
it. As they tell us with pride,
“It doesn’t matter when
you bloom/It matters that
you do.”Secret Sisters
Saturn Return
New West
4Squirrel Flower’s Dark Folk-Rock Majesty
“ALL MY FRIENDS ARE at the party/But I’ve got other plans,” Ella O’Connor Williams, the
indie singer-songwriter who records as Squirrel Flower, tells us. Her time alone is well-
spent. I Was Born Swimming is a fully realized debut album, with the raw-boned intimacy
and darkly distressed grandeur of Mitski or Lucy Dacus. Williams started releasing music
as Squirrel Flower when she was a college student in Iowa, and you can hear a stark
Midwestern expansiveness on songs like “Streetlight Blues” and “Home,” folk-rock mini epics
where her fear and hunger are primal and transporting. JON DOLANBREAKINGWilliamsLaura and
Lydia Rogers
(from left)