Kiley Lotz, a musician from Scranton, Pa. who performs as Petal, writes songs that ache. Aches are ambiguous and often mosaic sensations; they’re less a product of pain or pleasure than a seductive mingling of both. Ache can flow through the body as a kind of dark, indefinite wave, summoned by a photograph, or an old email.
Shame, which came out in October last year, functions well enough as an indie rock record, but its atmosphere is nervous and defeated, both the frenzied search for a cigarette and the long exhale of smoke layered on top of each other. Lotz describes scenes, relationships, and emotions in fragments. "A bulb/ A thought/ A home you’re not,” she sings in "Feel." Her voice is clear and direct, and illuminates her songs internally, like a skeleton made of Christmas lights. Sometimes she crafts an unstable reality, the physics of which are susceptible to anxiety. "Being mocked by the crack in the ceiling at the top of the stairs," she sings in "Sooner." "Wishing it’d swallow me whole." Later in the same song she threatens to "sow a garden of backbones I never had." Her imagery is rich and often moves like poetry, knowing just when to slip out of sense into a region that feels blurred and indefinite, yet true to the lived experience of love and panic—all this atomic activity beneath an otherwise placid surface. Lotz’s lyrics are also funny; in "Chandelier Thief," she instructs someone to "be thankful for the floor/ it leads you to a new place."
Fellow Scranton band Tigers Jaw acts as Lotz’s band on Shame; their playing is precise yet also softens at its edges. Chords appear like bruises, vivid shapes with unclear borders. In "Camera Lens II," there’s a delightful, lopsided quality to the changes; they almost seem to collapse on each other. "Nature" is the opposite; it’s completely skeletal, just vocals and drums, and yet it communicates with extreme precision something as shapeless as falling in love. "It’s like you have an innate sense of me," Lotz sings. "Like you’ve lived in my head waiting patiently/ To tell me 'you’re so afraid, just breathe.'"
Lotz's finest moment is on "Photobooth," which unfolds patiently as she sings, "Kissed under the streetlight/ By your friend’s house." Then the image recedes into a cerebral space, while the song itself amplifies and expands: "I guess what I mean is that if I could/ Pick out all the parts of my brain/ I would leave the place where you made your home." This is the lingering quality of Shame: Lotz’s ability to translate the imprecision of a kiss, the quality of a streetlight, the decay of a shadow into a memory so powerful it consumes everything. Shame is an album of preserved traces, of things that were.
