If Texan singer, songwriter, and producer Riya Mahesh’s latest album as Quiet Light had a color palette, it would be all pastels—not muted, but the lush, bright blue-pink-orange of a sunset-torn summer sky. Her delicate songs spin together like light cotton candy and melt away just as easily. Everything on Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2 feels ephemeral, often improvisational. Certain sounds come off almost originless and immaterial, on the verge of vaporizing moments after they reverberate through light, airy room tones. Mahesh’s production takes the shape and space of its container with ease. This is bedroom pop made with all the windows open and a crossbreeze moving through the curtains.
Even when Mahesh’s lyricism is scene-based, the events of these songs sound culled from memory, turned over obsessively since their occurrence—the party and the ER mentioned between piano plinks and synth buzzes on “Berlin,” the parking lot confessions in the distorted and New Wave-y “Self Tape,” the stray bits of gossip that appear throughout “Postinternetfame” and “You Say I Love You.” They all feel like disparate fragments brought together in the same memory-space, like a series of stream-of-consciousness journal entries or a barrage of memories in a mind that won’t let itself fall asleep. Layering and self-interruption are hallmarks of Mahesh’s composition and delivery—the stuttering and overlapping are crucial to the emotional machinery of these songs.
Closing track “You Say I Love You” details the moment where denial gives way to acceptance; Mahesh’s whispery refrain of “You say I love you but you don’t mean it” gets chopped up and pasted over itself as she clings to the last fragments of a fantasy in which the person she’s been pining for reciprocates her feelings. Dirge-like bowed strings replace the shifty drum machine loop that’s been guiding the song, occasionally getting yanked off its track in glitchy knots. “You Say I Love You” calls back to “Postinternetfame”—the latter’s drum machine progression sounds a bit like a sped-up version of the slow, syrupy one on the former. The lyrics of “Postinternetfame” remain steeped in crush-based delusion, with Mahesh’s chiptuned vocals making grandiose promises that will go unappreciated and unkept: “We could have ten kids and move wherever you want / I’ll get another job and change my name / I’ll do anything that I need to do / To get you to stay.”
Mahesh’s lovelorn narrator chases an unattainable love across the record’s half-hour runtime, documenting the breakdown of a romantic fantasy through emotionally dense yet sonically wispy snapshots. Her voice echoes through the sparse “Sound of You Leaving,” zooming in on the moment where a fair-weather lover’s presence turns to absence. On “Berlin,” this love interest’s shadow casts itself across every memory, Mahesh’s desire so single-minded it causes all other concerns to fade into the background (“I need you as the floorboards are sinking,” she lilts.) A speedy, synthy piece of R&B, “New Girls” finds Mahesh dejected and passively jealous of her love interest’s shifting objects of affection: “I can’t stop you from kissing new girls… eyeing new girls… loving new girls.” Through minimalist instrumentation and wandering vignettes warped by time and rumination, the spaces between fact and fiction, fantasy and reality, dreamscapes and waking life, start to blur. Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2 is a document of speculation—a sonic collage that feels as fragile and malleable as memory itself. [True Panther]
Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.
