Album Review: So Help Me God by Kelsey Lu
Kelsey Lu lights a match to burn off the pain and the pain stays. Their second album builds everything around the choice to keep holding it.
Most break-up songs are predicated on the exit. The door is closed, the lesson learned, the singer exits to a more liberated life. Kelsey Lu, the cellist and composer who scored films and occupied a Blue Note residency in the long pause between albums of their own material, keeps writing the reverse. Handed a clean break, they won’t take it. The choice repeated throughout the songs on their second album, the one not to break away, but to stay inside the grief and making that choice sound something akin to devotion.
“Reaper” enacts that impasse in all its dimensions. A nearly eight-and-a-half-minute-long song, Lu sings at a figure of Death like it is a negotiation and then refuses the job of intermediary: “You are the reaper left to decide/What you want, baby?/I’m not your guide.” The sin is passed back and forth, so Lu sings earlier on, “Can’t take a sin from a sinning man,” later on, “I took a sin from a sinning man.” The cure does not take. The singer says of taking pills, “Lifted, I feel nothing now,” and lights a match, “to watch it burn, but the pain still stayed.” Amidst this, the song falls apart, drums rise and fall, fade in and out, altered, a guitar floats in like distant noise (Kim Gordon), a saxophone hangs in the smear (Kamasi Washington). It ends with the song turning on Lu’s own voice, “You knew better/You’ll know better,” a half-memory, half-prophecy over the last, fragmented music.
What is staged on “Reaper” as an argument that two subsequent songs call an everyday habit. “Running to Pain,” Lu’s pop gesture, built on a steady drum-machine pulse, contains the honest description of the impulse-running back to the hurt, knowing it is the place you are going, with the confession that “It keeps me sane, I can’t refrain.” Lu calls this practice in this song the simplest of names: “Finding solace in motion.” On “8 52,” the same impulse sounds quieter, the bottom end a murky drone, and the confession is sweet: “I love to hang on/To all the pain.” In another moment, there is a fleeting flash of insight Lu doesn’t pursue, “I should’ve known me better than I did before you came into my life.” Knowing better hasn’t stopped it, though.
Shrink the scale from mortality to one person, and the uncertainty continues. On “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” the bassline stays grounded as the vocal weaves the heated question into loops, a question Lu cannot answer: “How do I know it’s enough? Is this enough?” The reassurance they hope for here comes back, again, twice: “I know it’s uncertain ‘cause nothing is certain.” On “What Can I Do,” that tension is shaped into the tightest pop form Lu attempts here, a heart “chained to you” with no further room to maneuver, hoping their listener “read between the lines/And through the quicksand of my eyes.” Both songs build a connection toward an abyss, and both admit immediately that the abyss might just be the normal state of things.
One track has no words written by Lu at all, and it’s the track where the grief is furthest from a personal experience. “American Sonnet” features a Wanda Coleman poem set for piano and cello, and the calm of that beginning does not last; static seeps in and a lop-sided kick begins to push against the stillness from the wrong side. Coleman’s imagery is corporeal and apocalyptic, “Mountains of flesh raging toward/Rapturous seas” and the lone line of violative intimacy: “Mother, your tongue plunders my mouth.” By handing the words to an entirely other poet, Lu lets the grieving expand from lost lover to something older and harder to define.
A father figure haunts the gentler songs. “Comfort” moves slowly and padded, Lu’s voice sunken deep within the mix, and the solace it requests continually bumps against the people it can’t trust: “Can’t trust in a man/Who tries to act like my father,” the legacy is rather “the sins of your Father, a bloody scene.” Even the simple request (“Oh, comfort, I’m trying to find you”) is situated beside “In the cradle of fire.” “Better Than That” takes the uneasiness further, letting it fly apart. It opens in near silence, and then crowds in-fragments of shame and defiance piling on top of one another and not quite landing—“See the rock in my hand,” a “Rusty refrigerator that never worked ‘cause it was too full,” a blunt challenge: “Look into my eyes and tell me that I’m lyin’.” Sampha surfaces briefly halfway through to echo and fill the vocal. It’s the messiest song on here, and the fragmentation occasionally gets ahead of what the song can support. Yet, the underlying defiance still holds: “Ripped the curtains off the blinds/Let the light in,” a clean line piercing the wreckage.
After eight songs of hanging on, finally, “Cutting Off the Head of a Ghost” opens into the biggest, clearest space Lu creates anywhere, the distortion so it scrapes the edges to keep the lift from ever truly feeling weightless, and what the song does is sever, not remember, one last time: “Knew you wouldn’t last once I met you/So I had to let you go,” Lu sings, and the words of devotion return, but warped: “Keys of life make peace with parting seas.” The others look backward to the pain; this one decides not to wait: “Not waiting ‘til I’m dead to come and find you.” The head comes off the ghost in “stuttered eyes falling,” and the writing reaches its closest possible resolution.
Why any of this is held at all becomes clearest on “Only the Lonely.” A skipping drum’n’bass pulse throbs beneath but does not drive, blending into the haze so that the rhythm pushes and the feeling does not. The song’s core message: “Only the lonely could feel like they know me.” The pain is kept for a reason. It’s the only thing here that still remembers the speaker, the only companion left that won’t abandon. Lu recalls the lover in meticulous detail: “You were my smoothest crime when I’d let you in,” “hot sweat in the air,” and yet arrives at the cooler-stated conclusion: “I disagree with the way that you loved me.” The loneliness survives the lover, becomes the closest this song cycle can offer toward home.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Reaper,” “American Sonnet,” “Only the Lonely”