Album Review: Becoming by Mare
Mare makes a smoothie, walks the dogs, and forgets to text back. She turns that small avoidance into the sturdiest writing on a debut, sure of who it’s about.
Expressing her emotions is a difficult task for Mare, which she is fully aware of. The singer from Philadelphia often finds her lips tightly shut and wears a vacant look instead of expressing an answer, says half a sentence when it is time for her to express a feeling or leaves her mobile messages unanswered. Being a church-raised and classically trained musician, she utilizes these songs as a tool to verbalize her feelings. Her physical imagery comes out quite convincing; the smaller it is, the better.
For “Heart On My Sleeve,” a text message arrives, and she whips up a smoothie, puts on a face mask, responds to some emails, takes the dogs for a walk, and takes her keys before she is aware of it, which she never wrote back. She is not avoiding the sender, she asserts, only unsure of what to say. The contrast is evident between them. The other person was reared “In so much affection” and commences with “A poetic confession”; her own sentence is more straightforward: “Most of my days I was locked in my room.” She makes the same admission even more personal on “Bad Habits,” “Can’t articulate when I miss you,” “My face is a blank stare,” and offers a promising alternative instead of a pledge, “Let you hold a half of me,” thirty days to break the worst of it. Even “Pearl,” the one developed as straight self-affirmation, breaks where she concedes, “I’m hoping I’m not broken.”
All day long, someone has made her run raggedly and on “Peace,” she talks about the exact night she drives home. She parks the car in the yard, throws the clothes off at the door, burns the brussels plastics at the stove, watches TV while the TV watches her, and at last, she is in a different place. This place is somewhere where people can’t tell her anything. The list of things shrinks further and becomes more physical, her hair down, her body flat, the room silent, her arms free, and until the chorus is simply two words swapped between both of them only, “Peace” and “Sleep.” She gives just one metaphor to the guy who is the reason for her draining, “You are a Rubik’s, too complicated/I can’t solve ya,” and then drops him to continue with her dinner. She has the quiet she’s been wanting, the lights are low, and the cube is left unsolved on the counter.
“Nothing” is the song that she sings, saying he could even “bend over backward” and write a thousand letters, walk through the hottest desert, and “Nothing would change.” Now that she is looking at the same hypothetical herself, she answers with all the things she would have done if he did not take her for granted, like “Crossed the seven seas,” “Hid all of your skeletons if you/Loaned them to me,” and still the answer is no. After some time, she is on the airplane flying to “Somebody New,” and she is surprised by her speed: “I do not recognize/Who I am and how did I/Move so fast.” She is really “Completely moved on,” but she is admitting it takes her heart “Healing slower today” to do so, a breath later. A sign, a four-leaf clover, or any other thing is what she is hoping to catch a glimpse of, but she keeps glancing over her shoulder.
Throughout the entirety of “Home,” moving day is evident. She brings in a suitcase, denying steering problems and failures to the old place, and the only thing she does is walk into a unit that is still merely “Space and a door” with bare ceilings and floors. The victory hits in fast strokes, “No one can hold me down/Taking my feet off the ground,” and if I didn’t know better, I would say this looks like empty talk if she didn’t actually carry the boxes all the time. “Unpacked, I’m all moved in,” she sings, with the concept of freedom being represented by the number of cardboard boxes and bare space on the floor. The cover gives her a breather, a stretch of pure singing between rooms she built on her own. This time, only the singer didn’t build the room she’s standing in.
When Mare writes a pep talk on “Answer” in particular, she reaches for the nearest motivational poster. Despite all the seeds, hydration in the desert, a unique diamond in the mine, a brightness that someone “tried to obscure” but wasn’t able to. Though the track “Embrace” sounds even more uninspired, “Gotta face facts/Embracing my path/Getting over my past,” are the prosy they are the prosy they are the prosy they are the prosy they are the prosy they are the prosy they are the prosy they are the prosy they are the prosy they are the prosy they are the prosy they are the prosy with one practically true line about aging, “When you get older/Everything specs in.” The emotion of this moment is unperceived until it is substituted with some other tangible thing. Back in the kitchen, there is nothing of the sort. Just a burnt meal and an unread reply, that is still a message on the phone, which is placed face down.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Peace,” “Heart On My Sleeve,” “Bad Habits”