“Only the brightest silver fish / Shows when the light hits,” sings Léna Bartels on the title track of her second full-length The Brightest Silver Fish, out now via Glamour Gowns. The image might be a small miracle, over in a moment, or else a figment of the imagination caught from the corner of an eye. That we never find out which is typical of a record that does not so much mask its meaning as refuse to settle on a single answer. One caught within a series of dualities, be it between autonomy and inaction, startling beauty and the punishingly mundane, and thus open to a variety of interpretations. Even when, peering into the water later on in the track, Bartels believes she sights the fish again, the result remains ambiguous. Does the small, glinting creature she sees swimming with its family represent the possibility of the things most desired: freedom, connection, agency? Or only reinforce the opposite reality, where such ideals can only exist at a remove from our lives in their own watery, alien world?
Those familiar with previous Léna Bartels releases will appreciate how this multifaceted style applies to the very sound of her music. From the punchy, cathartic indie rock highs of debut Preservation to the intimate, wintery folk of recent split It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year, the Portland-born, Brooklyn-based songwriter has explored a vast amount of terrain in a short space of time. The Brightest Silver Fish pushes this variation further still. Seventies songwriters such as Judee Sill are a touchstone, but so are alt rock and grunge acts from the nineties, electro pop and even mainstream country. The latter apparent on single ‘Bad Sugar’ with its simmering verses and bright, confessional choruses, as well as the genre’s classic concerns like working too hard for too little. But for all the stylistic shapeshifting, the album is notably cohesive, each venture out in a new direction not the consequence of idle wandering but the very thing demanded by the emotional landscape of each specific track. As though the songs are not traversing new spaces at all, rather showing the same thing viewed under a changing light.
Indeed, the image of light recurs across the record, reinforcing this sense of competing perspectives. Consider the morning rays on ‘Give Myself a Way’, a song loaded with double meanings right down to its playful title. Give myself a way easily becomes give myself away, agency flipped into submission depending on how you choose to hear it. Or ‘Amber’ with its rose-coloured curtains and shadows moving slow, at once a towering, shoegaze-inflected rock song and late night confession voiced to an empty room, where what might be a parent or lover speaks to the person submerged in their protective instincts. “While you’re sleeping I’ll brush the knots out” Bartels sings, an image that can again be split in two. A demonstration of tender intimacy that grows stranger and more foreboding within the song’s dark heft, the fine line between care and control blurred by the desperation of love.
Unfurling with slow grace, ‘Fighter’ approaches a similar situation from a different angle. The narrator is another mother or lover twisted up with the blessing of caring for someone, afflicted by the curse of being unable to guarantee that person’s constant comfort and joy. The taut, urgent rhythm of ‘I Knew’ captures the same despair in a very different manner, playing like an anxious thought on a loop. The result is curious, its perpetual motion paradoxically suggesting stasis, like a mind struck in a single groove. And while the whispered opening of tentative follow-up ‘Nothing Makes Me Feel Touched’ could hardly be more contrasting in style, the effect turns out to be very similar. “I confess that nothing’s getting on me / And nothing gets me off / And so I lay back in the twirl / As they are watering the brush” Bartels sings in another image of inertia, only for the track to again into a fervent, noisy conclusion based upon a repeated refrain: “When I insist there’s light to see / When I hold it up.”
Given the title and the artwork, it is tempting to return to the metaphor of the fish. One hooked in the mouth perhaps, being reeled through its surroundings with dizzying speed, overcome with pain and panic and doubt. Until the moment the surface is finally breached and the angler confronted, this fish can have no idea of the future before it. Whether its fate is to be kissed and released to go on swimming, or cracked on the head and stowed hollow-eyed on ice.
It is this torment of not knowing, both for themselves and those they care about, that concerns Léna Bartels’s narrators. Figures stuck between the simultaneous desire to fight against the line and submit to its inevitable pull. The Brightest Silver Fish offers no solution to the problem, just a picture of those muddling through. Consider the title track again, opening as a hushed, almost hesitant folk song, the lines delivered with a contradictory tone somewhere between intense concentration and absent-minded distraction. As though something intense and dramatic is unfolding outside the frame of the track and Bartels is determined not to look at it. Feeling, perhaps, to ignore its presence is to make life liveable. To be occupied within the song is to go some way toward shaping the conditions of the world.
Only the brightest silver fish
Shows when the light hits
I suppose I imagined it
Gasping for air in the beak of a gold goose
Greedy to want and dumb to refuse
The Brightest Silver Fish is out now via Glamour Gowns and available from the Léna Bartels Bandcamp page.
Photo by Morgan Healani Mein