Album Review: Visitor by SIENNA SPIRO
On the debut of orchestral soul cut at Abbey Road and Electric Lady, a 20-year-old Londoner writes love as a lease and signs it with the end date showing.
Somewhere in London in 2021, SIENNA SPIRO was uploading videos of herself singing into a phone camera, building her listening base around Etta James, Amy Winehouse, Frank Sinatra, and Frank Ocean. Now, five years later—at twenty—she is recording her debut album between Electric Lady in New York, Abbey Road in London, and Valentine in Los Angeles, setting her soul-driven writing against orchestral strings. On Visitor, her debut album, she explained that it was born out of feeling “like a visitor, like someone who’s just passing through.” Her women are like that on the page: guests in a bed, a house, a life titled to somebody else, watching the daylight on their own welcome.
One take is said to have sufficed for “The Visitor,” her vocals soaring with a 20-piece string orchestra arranged by Peter Rotter. “We lay on towers, on rented time/I’m yours for hours, you’re always mine/All things expire, I know you won’t stay,” she sings—like a hired spinner by the hour, turning her watch’s hands. To make a pair she pleads, “Say that you love me/Say I’m all you need,” self-aware and ragging on herself at once. She offers a compromise on “Mono No Aware,” a Japanese tribute to the ache in every parting, taking down all of those for whom it applies: “For flowers to expire/For love to lose desir /For you to get so tired.” She indulges herself in the chorus: “It’s okay to fall and turn to blue/It’s okay to love and okay to lose/The beauty is you don’t have to choose,” yet still insists, “Everybody dies/And I still ask why.”
She tells the man on “Die on This Hill,” face-to-face, that not one thing reaches him—“God I wish one thing meant to you”—but plants herself anyway: “I’ll take my pride, stand here for you/No, I’m not blind, just seeing it through,” then promises it endlessly: “I’ll take tonight and die on this hill/I always will.” She follows this with the promise of a situationship on “We’re Not in Love,” singing, “We’re not in love/But we make love/And that don’t make no sense,” and then providing the sense herself: a man who is “right here but you’re not here,” as she vows to “keep coming back to you anyways,” close but “not enough to break.” She drops her remaining cool with, “You say I’m pretty, but you hit so hard/Oh I’m laughing, but I’m in the dark.”
On “Great Expectation,” she accepts the worst of these bargains: intimacy existing “in my head” with a man who “calls me till you got something you need me for.” Missing him so much, she rewrites her own story: “I go back and change the plot/Just to have you in the way I want.” By the chorus, she’s reduced to hope: “All I need is the great expectation of you.”
Then comes the persona piece, “He’s Not My Baby, I’m His,” sung from the perspective of a girl spending “all Sunday” waiting for a man “twice my age,” crying herself “out of a hunger” by Monday. She calls the whole experience “a guilty pleasure” with someone she “should know better.” The singer spins into the courtroom of her own conscience: “Stroke in my head, it’s a stroke in my ego.” She grows colder: “And no one feels quite as seen/As when a child gets chosen,” justifying everything with words that also condemn it. She frames it as evidence: “And I’m half his age, it’s a rite of passage/To know it’s wrong, but not quite care.” SPIRO constructs her subjects such that the facts sit in front of them like testimony, and they always maintain perspective.
The man gets his applause on “You Stole the Show”: “You stole the show, got a standing ovation/I lost control, from the stage, from your face,” and the reassurance she chases: “I ask if you love me, and you just shrug your shoulders.” She grows more jagged in the next verse: “My love turns green, I know you/Made me hate myself,” and she knows whose fault that is. On “Pure,” she turns the suspicion onto her own work: “Used to do it all so pure/For the love of the song no more,” and, “Now I think about an applause/When I open my mouth.” Her friends follow: “I’ve been losing all my friends/Pushing people to the edge.” It’s not applause she’s chasing—it’s meaning. By the time the last song arrives, she just wants to feel something: “Just wanna feel special/I just wanna feel.” The last thing she admits to feeling is numbness.
On “Time, You & Me,” she settles for a cliché: “Time waits for no one/Naturally,” imagining a fictional man who will “waste the days till forty-five” and “regret the time as he waits to die,” a stranger looking back in disappointment, while she recounts her own. She comes to and is brief: “Everybody rides a carousel/That’s what it costs/To get on again and off again, to lose the ones you love/But to have them for the hours and the minutes that there was.” “You’ll never get back what you’ve spent on me,” she says, and he is listening—and she has marked his weeks.
Then there is the “blue door” of “My House,” the one place she owns unconditionally. She invokes the neighbor who will testify forever to how slow she was to enter the water filled with “the tears you put into my eyes.” She built her kitchen “with my bare hands,” bled “into the foundation,” swearing it will remain “‘til I’m cremated.” She swears the walls she built “gonna fall down for no one.” The tears he caused fill her pool and her home, but the door is hers to close. The song continues with the tears he willed filling her pool, her deed, her blood in the foundation.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “My House,” “He’s Not My Baby, I’m His,” “The Visitor”