“What happens when your people die?” asks Eliza Niemi at the beginning of ‘Do U FM?’, itself the beginning of her new record Progress Bakery. “Why’d they move the rock to the other side of Ulster Park?” These two seemingly unrelated questions—one universal and existential in nature, the other specific and personal about a no more than a rock in the park near where she grew up—capture something about the Toronto-based artist’s songwriting. A style full of wonder, though not often in the starry-eyed-awe-at-the-majesty-of-the-universe sense. Rather something more literal and common place, with Niemi often picking up thoughts and ideas and putting them down again, only to return eight songs later to wonder anew. This inquisitive gaze is not limited to the world around Niemi either, with her own interior given its fair share of focus (“But am I feeling it?” she asks towards the end of that song in a typical moment of introspection, “Cos I don’t know how to tell if I’m feeling it or not”), and the result like hearing thoughts as they occur and disapate in real time.
The record’s title, and in some ways its entire inspiration, is based on an actual bakery Niemi would pass each day, the image of its broken sign somehow indicative of a bittersweet humour almost cosmic in scale. “A few years ago I sublet an apartment during a pretty heavy time in my life, and right down the street was a spot called Progress Bakery,” Niemi explains. “I would walk by it every day… chew on its name all morning. I thought it was quite funny and weirdly fitting for where I was at in my life. Their sign out front is half fallen off (it says ‘gress bakery’). I wanted to make an album like the bakery’s broken sign—funny, strange, warm, melancholic and hopeful, that embodied this feeling of making steady yet non-linear progress.”
That the last line of that quote works as a perfect description of the record underlines Eliza Niemi’s success. She presents life as a series of small moments filtered through the prism of her brain, some jarring and awkward (like when she psyches herself up to dance on ‘I TrieD’), others smooth and graceful, or at least oddly beautiful. And the idiosyncrasies inherent in such oddness are often key. ‘DM BF’ is something like a love song, but its object of attention is an unexpected one. “When I wrote this song I was living alone with no internet in a remote, wooded area,” Niemi told Talkhouse in a piece about the track. “I’d been thinking a lot about the cryptid Dogman that year. I wondered what it would be like to see him there in those woods, from the window I wrote at each day. I felt connected to him.”
But there’s depth to this offbeat style. Even at her most playful, Niemi is reflecting on life’s big questions. “I thought of how love can feel like this,” she continues on ‘DM BF’. “Like being connected to something that might not even exist, or might just all be in your head.” The album is full of imaginative descriptions and left-field thoughts, turns of phrase that that can be hyper specific or beguilingly vague. She describes a shirt as “Tampax-pearl-blue iridescent,” the sweet smell of drying blood “like a tar street.” ‘Albuquerque’ could be a piece of barely-there Joy Williams flash fiction (“What were you doing at the Albuquerque Airport? What were you doing there?” go the only two lines), while ‘Dusty’ unfurls in an effortless flow. “It tastes like Winnipeg, like cigarettes and snow,” Niemi sings in a moment of particularly pleasing poetry. “Tastes like all my cousins being sad to see you go.”
To describe the music of Eliza Niemi as pop music feels like both an over- and understatement. On the one hand, these are deeply quirky and unique songs, built with an artist’s intuitive sense of composition and with little regard for conventional structures. But they are also undeniably infectious, packed with of melody and a sense of playfulness that feels baked into the record’s very bones. Which makes its sense of childlike curiosity (admittedly with more than a little added grown-up cynicism) feel genuine rather than cloying or twee. Niemi isn’t paintings a pastel-hued cartoon of real life, but focussing on its gritty, peculiar details. And at the heart of it all are those questions, some funny and knowing, but others piercingly direct and vulnerable, evoking a very relatable sense of bewilderment at trying to find one’s place in this weird world. “Will it be what I wanted?” as she asks on ‘Pocky’. “Will it be how I pictured it?”
Progress Bakery is out now via Vain Mina / Tin Angel Records. Get it from the Eliza Niemi Bandcamp page.
