An album “which builds upon the foundations of previous release Calamity, using vulnerability and emotional honesty to move beyond difficult experiences and towards something new.” So we wrote of Aubrey Jane‘s new full-length Starshiner, the release seeing the New Orleans-based artist embrace both folk-inflected indie rock and confessional bedroom pop sensibilities to conjure a sound that’s as honest as it is emotive. Take single ‘Karmic’, with a sound that flows “between relative restraint and urgent peaks of intensity,” as we continued, “confront[ing] a dysfunctional relationship head on, probing at the parts at hurt with an almost masochistic compulsion.”
Despite this inherently personal style and subject matter, Starshiner was far from a solo endeavour. The album was written and recorded with help from Teddy Tietze and Giovanni Ventello, as well as contributions by Rob Florence (drums), Deven Raval (bass), Tucker Godbold (upright), Fraser Wright (bass and lead guitar) and Frank Stewart (pedal steel). Working with this group allowed Aubrey Jane to push her sound towards a newfound richness while still retaining that vulnerability that is central to its spirit.
Single ‘Late Winter, Early Spring’ is a great example. A slow-burn country-tinged number, it evokes the liminal space of its title to explore an equally strange middle ground between the end of a relationship and the act of actually letting go. “I stalk you on Facebook / ‘Cause I’ve got you blocked on everything / And you haven’t changed in the six years / It took for me to feel this way,” Jane sings in the opening lines, immediately establishing the emotional stakes despite the almost murmured delivery. But as the song unfurls, the instrumentation gathers into something almost thunderous and the vocals rise in tandem, as though finally a stopped-up anger can be voiced and released. The catharsis might not be powerful enough to exorcise the longing which clearly still sits at the track’s heart, and the insistence of having moved on rings hollow. But the openness of such confessions nevertheless feels like an important step in admitting the truth.
You don’t see it coming,
You’ve got a wife and a baby
You’ve all but forgotten
The fires and the ruins where you left me
And all the fresh hell,
All of the baggage that I carry
But it doesn’t hurt
It doesn’t hurt it doesn’t hurt me
The raw self-examination is not only limited to romantic histories either. One of the most moving tracks on the album, ‘Locket’ considers the absence of a parent in a typically forthright manner. “I miss my mom / I think I understand her better now / Now that I’m older I fit into her clothes, / Like facing a mirror,” as Aubrey Jane concedes in the first verse. But again the progress of the song is matched by a kind of emotional progress too, Jane coming to understand that, despite all of the water that has passed under the bridge in the intervening years, there’s still a need for maternal support. “And I know we didn’t get along so well / When I was figuring myself out for the first time,” as she sings. “But now I’m starting over and / I think I need her help.”
Starshiner is out now and available from the usual places.