Vanities, the debut full-length by French producer Barbara Braccini, aka Malibu, is equal parts devotion and alienation. Her short, lush ambient compositions layer formless washes of synth with field recordings of city sounds; seamy and ominous, they evoke haunted industrial areas or images of abandoned business districts during Covid. At the same time, the songs on Vanities highlight Braccini’s clarion, wordless vocals—hymnlike passages that attempt to thaw the production’s frosty veneer. The feeling Vanities evokes has, in my mind, more in common with clinical, alienating, but ultimately invigorating films like Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans or Spring Breakers than it does any of Braccini’s contemporaries.
Vanities was made largely in Stockholm but finished in Los Angeles, and it feels unmistakably like a piece of California noir. From the sirens that drift through the thickly atmospheric opener “Nu” to the new-age wash of “The Hills” to the voice that whispers, “It’s our secret, you can’t tell anybody,” like a sample from some ’90s thriller, on closer “Watching People Die,” Vanities revels in the chilly contradictions of the City of Angels—its pervasive warmth and the way its layout forces a sense of atomization, the vague spirituality and the potent sense of moneyed privilege. At times, the album recalls the ambient-leaning back half of Chromatics’ Kill for Love, another serotonin-depleted record that feels like a strung-out drive through the city in the early morning hours.
This palette isn’t wholly dissimilar from Palaces of Pity, Braccini’s 2022 EP. The difference now is that everything feels crisper and more expansive: Braccini’s voice is clear and high in the mix, as opposed to a whisper beneath the shoegazey wash; individual samples, like the crashing waves on “Spicy City” and “What Is It That Breaks,” can be heard clearly amid the noise. Listening to Vanities after Palaces of Pity, it feels like a weight has been lifted; for every song on Vanities like “A World Beyond Lashes,” which feels like it’s collapsing in on itself beneath layers of noise, there’s one like “Lactonic Crush,” whose hard-won lightness and gently swelling synth recalls dream trance at its foggiest.
It’s not a knock to describe Vanities as functional music: Braccini has said she considers the Malibu project as a kind of diary, and I have many friends who’ve turned to this kind of organic ambient music in recent years as a way to tune out an overstimulating world. That Braccini doesn’t shy away from the potentially hypnagogic or convalescent properties of Vanities is one of its greatest strengths: The piercing exhale of “Contact” might be one of the single most cathartic moments in her catalog, and there are many such moments like that across the album.
It all adds up to the feeling that Vanities is, ultimately, hopeful in a way that Palaces of Pity couldn’t have foretold. The album’s second half introduces flashes of serenity into Braccini’s music. On the nine-minute title track, her voice floats effortlessly above cello played by longtime collaborator Oliver Coates; it feels like watching the sunrise from somewhere there’s no smog, no noise, and nobody around for miles. Closing track “Watching People Die,” despite its title, is the apotheosis of this new lightness. It’s mostly just Braccini’s piano and vocals, ambling forward slowly, until it fades into a static buzz. It seems to take solace in the fact that mortality is one of the only constants in life; simple and meditative, it radiates pure calm.
