jenno snyder is the project of Jenna Synder, a “queer experimental composer” from Staten Island. Her latest album Too North is an original combination of emotive bedroom recordings and strange aural collages. With a little help from Matt Gaffney and Justin Marino, Snyder utilises guitar, bass, drums, trumpet, theremin and tambourine, as well as some less conventional instruments like a propane tank, pots and pans, and a jar of paper clips.
Perhaps unsurprisingly then, it’s a difficult album to categorise. Snyder herself describes it as “a careful step outside her bedroom. It is a series of bad haircuts. It’s fist-clenching exercises. It’s a butterfly stitch. It’s stuck on a chain email. It’s smothered, covered, and peppered. And it’s listening to you too.”
‘Being Up Lately’ serves as a disconcerting prologue, the instrumentation ominously dissonant, the vocals just snatches of answerphone recordings garbled by interference. The track ends by amping up the discomfort, morphing into what sounds like the shrill warble of an alarm, before segueing into the relatively gentle guitar and drums of ‘Take Care’. But this track isn’t simple dreamy bedroom pop, there’s so much going on, drawing on the aforementioned diversity of instruments to create something that sounds at once introspective, angry and triumphant, the chorus spiking with the embittered lines.
“you would take care of me
you would take care
you would take care of me till i turned blue”
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=2921514626 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=2689968404]
‘Habit’ opens with some hushed lo-fi atmospherics before the onset of strummed guitar and Snyder’s vocals, delivering four repeated lines interspersed with more distorted samples. The insistence and repetition creates a sense of free-falling emotion, not wholly unlike the slowcore of Low. The song’s echo then passes on into ‘The Rest is Gravy’, which feels claustrophobic and surreal with it’s shuffling drums and gaudy streaks of guitar. This atmosphere is heightened by the audio clip from a suicide documentary.
‘Visitor’s Hour’ follows strange and hushed, built on stark guitar and the increasing jangle of pots and pans, growing like paranoid thoughts in the synapses of your brain, while ‘No Man’ moves in clumsy undulations, the lyrics an opaque depiction of difficult but ultimately triumphant recovery. “But for now you and I must part ways”, Snyder sings, “I’ll go ’cause when I see you I know one day I’ll be whole”.
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=2921514626 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=3210763091]
Penultimate track ‘The Only Living Boy in New York’ begins taut and reserved, before erupting into a chorus full of fervour, while finale ‘Blue Light’ is a slice of swirling instrumental drone pop, a song so rich and textured it feels like it’s own microclimate. It’s the fitting end to an intriguing collection of songs.
You can get Too North now, on cassette and name-your-price download, from the jenno snyder Bandcamp page.
