More Brilliant is the Hand That Throws the Coin, the debut EP from the NYC-based 20-year-old Margaux Bouchegnies, is uncannily wise and self-assured for someone her age. “I want to see myself malfunctioning/I want to see myself skip in place,” she sings on “Hot Faced,” over a knotty and beautiful string arrangement, sounding a million miles from the moment of shame she sings about. Hearing a line like that makes you think about what it would feel like to watch yourself fuck up from space.
Bouchegnies’ music lies two steps away from a lot of familiar indie rock: Her voice recalls Julia Jacklin, and her arrangements might have been plucked from a Fleet Foxes record. But the music she makes from these reference points proves difficult to pin down. A song like “Palm” feels sympatico with jazz standards and Françoise Hardy tearjerkers if anything. “Day time seems as blue and heavy as the lake by home,” Bouchegnies sings, as guitars chirp like cartoon songbirds. When she sings about love, it sounds like she is doing so from the inside of a snowglobe and is asking you to crack the glass with a teaspoon.
Her songs often deal with the sort of first love that feels devastating in its purity—the kind that leaves you crying on the couch not because anything bad happened but because one day the joy will dissipate. It is a profoundly early-twentysomething experience, and Bouchegnies writes about it without cliché. “Please keep reading your book out loud/I like to hear your voice/I like to see your mouth,” she sings on “Faced With Fire.” Her voice quivers as she considers “time’s relentless melt,” and behind her an upright bass lurches like a rocking chair on an uneven porch.
“Cave In,” is the EP’s most spectacular moment, shifting from low, nervous verses into a thicker, darker chorus, strings and fuzzed-out bass thudding into each other. The arrangement keeps building, each new sound adding to the track’s chattering momentum and amplifying the force of the chorus. The song feels like a first kiss, like drinking a beer at a party too fast because you’re anxious. But “Cave In” is not about collapsing under pressure and feeling small, like the song’s title suggests. It’s a declaration of power. “Lay down/This your final offer,” repeats Bouchegnies in the song’s chorus. More Brilliant is the Hand That Throws the Coin is just that: a statement of serious self possession, a record of huge songs written by a young person with an unnerving degree of precision and command.
