Until She Was Gone

Tune-Yards “Heart Attack”

Merrill Garbus’ catalog follows a trajectory of her access to equipment and collaborators, with each record more polished and professional than the last. And, also, maybe a little less compelling? Her debut was essentially built out of lo-fi digital recordings pieced together in Audacity – perhaps the most ambitious piece of art anyone’s ever used that program to make – and is startling in its textural contrasts and intimate feeling. The follow up, w h o k i l l, added fluid, slinky bass and horns, and while it was recorded more traditionally, it still felt wild and untamed. One of the exciting things to me about these records is that Garbus’s performances and arrangements were raw and unorthodox, but definitely not naive. When I wrote about the second album at Pitchfork, I described her vocal as being like a feral Mariah Carey. I stand by that! Her best work is always in this thrilling space between unhinged feeling and total control.

Fast forward to her fourth album, I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life, and things are a bit different. The band has stabilized enough so that she’s no longer the only permanent member, and she no longer seems to be limited by instrumental choices or the need to arrange songs so they can be easily performed live by two or three people on stage. You can sense her thrill about this in a lot of the music. “Heart Attack” in particular piles on textural elements rather playfully, but she’s careful not to clutter the beat. I love her vocal on this track – it’s like she’s living out a fantasy of being a house diva, even if the music never fully enters that realm.

That hesitation to fully embrace genre conventions is part of what makes this kind of a strange album to process. It all sounds so transitional, and it’s hard for me to listen to it without feeling like I’m listening to her work. Every moment sounds like a decision, and nothing feels instinctive. Obviously a lot of records, good and bad, are the product of endless editing and overthinking. It’s just that Garbus is someone who has always thrived on impulse and intuition. It’s noticeable when it’s missing.

Buy it from Amazon.