Album Review: Daughter from Hell by Gracie Abrams
Written and recorded with Aaron Dessner, Gracie Abrams’ third album casts her as the one doing the damage.
In the arena tour promoting The Secret of Us, unreleased tracks kept creeping into the setlists, and the crowds familiar with every single word of the previous hits sensed something different about them. Gracie Abrams carved out a young career as pop music’s most consistent wronged party, a diarist with her heartbreaks coming along with a culprit attached; and the intimate voice combined with the well-known name were making it too easy to label her as a kid who dresses up in Taylor Swift’s clothes. She heard every single word of the criticism. The new material on Daughter from Hell, being tested on stage, was born on the opposite side, composed and recorded in collaboration with Aaron Dessner at Long Pond and Electric Lady, where she is the one who leaves, the one who falls apart, the one whose mother needs an apology.
On “Hit the Wall,” Abrams refers to herself as a crack in the pavement and a slipknot; she sings right above simple piano chords and low synth, while the drums keep a steady beat; and she tells anyone listening that she is not a problem anyone solves. Underneath everything there is an admission: “I live in a pattern of breakdowns.” “Look at My Life” repeats the panic on top of the beat, which keeps poking forward; it is another Dan Nigro co-production and the song has got the nervous rhythm; and she asks “Do I look high-functioning or/Is my façade crumbling?” while she begs her friend Caroline not to give an actual answer. The party portraits belong to the same diary. She comes to the party alone, with “Got 50 bucks and a braincell,” she spots a lonely girl across the room, realizes that it is her, and by the time of “Cold Goodbyes” the strangers who read her face turn into aliens who ask if she is okay.
No one wronged her in “Good Reason.” She walks out on a guy so gentle that he lets her, a guy whom she is sure “would start bleeding” covering it “up for my feelings,” and the whole string of “if onlys” keeps searching for a loophole, if only the timing was bad, if only he had been cruel, if only he did not adore her. But none of the excuses work until she finds herself on trial: “If only I had a good reason.” “Mews” takes the same frankness to the dying relationship in London, an engine fading, four tires flaming; and midway she delivers her ugliest self-portrait yet: “Once was a rock, I’m your hard place now.” By the end of the verse she wonders whether he meant naïve as a compliment or diagnosis; and in neither case does she prove her point.
The title track stays close to drumless for a long period, piano chords and one low accompaniment tone underneath the voice left outside of everything; and Abrams fills the empty room with debts, the plate her mother made her, the life she lent her, the house she supported with both her hands. She wants the patience, the grace, the sugar, the metal, the mirror. And then the promise, in the careful, almost apologetic phraseology: “I’ll try to become you now,” with the pause she leaves after every line here.
The subject of “Death Wish” pours wine laced with poison and invites her to dance only when there is somebody around to witness this act. Abrams writes the portrait from close quarters, old enough, she says, “To know you as a gateway drug”; and she counts the one breath of the air they share as a death wish. In “Men Like You” she constructs a total goodbye for a user and a climber; and she swerves the pronoun at the very end: “Girl, I know men like you.” And in “The Knife” she decides to keep the wound, plans to name it, take care of it, claim it; but she goes out and pours her case of kerosene and takes the knife.
She wrote the “Sober” dream before, an almost-kiss in the yellow light which both sides agree in advance to blame on the high; and she glides through it on charm. “Broke My Heart” sits right next to it, a blindsided ballad straight from the days of her wronged-party years, though this one carries the line everybody blindsided ends up telling into a mirror: “Wish that we both had the same set of evidence,” a courtroom grievance she delivers without breaking the melody.
Finally, a safe person comes along in “Afflictions”; he holds her hand during turbulence and sugarcoats the oxygen; and Abrams manages to make the confession which she never gets to in the harder songs: “You’re strong, I’m not.” On “Humming” she looks beyond her own wreckage to the twenties of everybody else, the weed from the age of seventeen catching up, childhood houses gone, a generation grieving in public while someone profits from their grief; and she concludes with singing as coping that she can actually afford: “But we’re made to try through humming.” Marcus Mumford joins on “What If It’s Right?” bringing the grain rougher and more grounded than hers; the two voices orbit around one question over a folk-pop sway; and in the middle of the conversation sits the fairest sentence in both directions: “I might break you, but you broke me back.”
Abrams plays the haunting of “Imaginary Friend” for humor, apologizes to the empty room, asks it for one little favor, admits “I talk to you, you don’t talk back.” Morning in a kitchen, and she can feel someone who is not there. And then the longing becomes physical; she undresses, thinks something which she knows is wrong and keeps thinking. She finds herself back in the kitchen, and the presence remains unaware of her; and the flirting becomes the grief in a bathrobe, the small talk pitched at the one listener who never answers, the favor asked anyway.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Good Reason,” “Mews,” “Humming”