The English indie folk trio Daughter nestled into the void on 2013’s If You Leave, but on Not to Disappear, their second and better record, they fashion their own lifeline back out again. The debut was spacious and crystalline yet suffocating, somehow; the music, epic in its melancholy, made claims of a vast emotional experience that exceeded the scope of the lyrics. It didn’t help that Elena Tonra, a hushed singer in thrall to Jeff Buckley and Ian Curtis, was writing in an idiom of frozen hearts, heavy winters, and home-wrecking floods, metaphors as dead as her idols.
In the last three years, Tonra and the band have wisely ditched the notion that seriousness plus reverb equals profound art. You can hear the transformation on "Numbers," Not to Disappear’s lead track. Tonra opens with a deadpan jibe at a mystery antagonist–"Take the worst situations/ Make a worse situation"–then, after a pregnant pause, gets down to an unsympathetic commentary on hookup culture and its grubby allure. "I’ll wash my mouth but still taste you," she sighs, letting her implications linger, before serenely chanting, "I feel numb in this kingdom."
Recorded with Nicolas Vernhes, the esteemed Brooklyn producer, the music is expansive and spangly, like staring down a deep well to glimpse a ripple of light on the water. There’s a mix of nocturnal indie-pop, gothic post-punk, doomy shoegaze, chest-beating post-rock, and resplendent dream-pop, which all comes off as a great, stellar mush. Igor Haefeli’s guitars are devoutly atmospheric, while Remi Aguilella tends to drum like the National’s Bryan Devendorf, surging forth at the first opportunity, as if to race beyond the desolate soundscape’s frame.
The only sonic outlier is "No Care," a surprising nod to Arab Strap, speak-sung by an antsy narrator whose agency shrinks as she mollifies a manipulative partner. On a record dense with allusions to imminent motherhood, it bodes ill that every relationship is ruptured by insecurity ("To Belong"), undermined by emotional distance ("Alone / With You"), or both of the above, as on "No Care": "Oh, there has only been one time where we fucked, and I felt like a bad memory," Tonra sings. "How I wanted you to promise we would only ever make love/ But my mouth felt like I was choking, broken glass, so I just slept it off."
For all Not to Disappear’s forward strides, something remains of the debut’s pallor, and with it a niggling suspicion that, despite their commercial inferiority to the xx, Florence and the Machine, and even Foals, Daughter have no spicy condiments for those groups’ bread and butter. But if their five-year-plan isn’t to play catch-up with festival-bait big-leaguers, a song like "Doing the Right Thing," about the plight of an Alzheimer’s sufferer, suggests they have the legs to go somewhere else entirely. The song is earthy yet spectral, like an emboldened Hundred Waters, sung from the unique viewpoint of a dementia victim fully aware of her lapsing state. She drowns in lost memories–"I'll call out in the night for my mother/ But she isn't coming back for me"–yet remains privy to the big picture: "But you will not tell me that/ Cause you know it hurts me every time you say it." Concluding the song from in front of a television set, she sings that while "everyone’s in love, I just sit in silence."
If she’d been attuned to Not to Disappear, the narrator would know the appearance of love is often a veneer. It’s an instructive double-standard: Daughter’s music spans that gap between the very real drudgery of everyday life, and the more potent stories we tell ourselves when times are bleak.
