It’s virtually impossible to lose a game of FreeCell. Unlike other forms of solitaire, 99 percent of the deals are solvable. It’s a game of choice and organization. You put down one card, then another, until—like writing a sentence or a song—you’re left with a larger sequence. The Queens musician Lina Tullgren developed a FreeCell habit while on tour, using the game to compartmentalize time while experiencing the swimmy delirium that comes with waking up in a new city every day and having to connect with a new room of strangers in a different time zone. With elements of 1990s slowcore, quaggy indie-rock, and experimental composition, Free Cell successfully captures a dissociative feeling that lies somewhere between boredom and nausea, like sitting in a sauna. It does so with deliberate calculation. While their 2017 debut, Won, felt loose and irregular, with melodies that changed like moods, Free Cell is an exercise in construction and pattern-based songwriting rather than improvisation.
Tullgren was encouraged to play music from a young age by their mother, a classical flautist; after splitting their adolescence between the fiddle and guitar, Tullgren has finally permitted the two to meet on Free Cell. They’re assisted by Brooklyn-based composer Simon Hanes, whose Italian romantic influences—Rossini comes quickest to mind—seep into the music.
The album begins slowly, as Tullgren sings the opening line one syllable per second: “Staring into my golden dreams.” Their guitar picks out a slacker’s riff as strings begin to wince. “Picking up a game to make me proud,” they intone (presumably having won another game of FreeCell). As Tullgren ever so slightly increases speed with each lyric, Hanes’ arrangement takes on strings, horns, brass, and distortion. Free Cell sounds as though it’s hooked onto a pendulum, swinging feverishly between beauty and distortion, vigour and lethargy. Any breakouts of prettiness are either followed by unlovely noise or gibbering riffs going nowhere. Any instance of vitality is tempered by disaffection. It’s a continual frustration that presumably puts the listener within Tullgren’s state of mind—persistently waiting for a moment of relief and clarity that never fully arrives.
Tullgren’s songs are fraught with tension, like elastic bands threatening to snap—but they fall slack just as you expect to get hit in the eye. “Something is slowly, slowly, slowly,” they sing with quickening fervor on “Soft Glove 1” and “Soft Glove 2,” but instead of bursting, the rhythm relaxes back to its starting place.
“Golden Babyland,” is the only song on Free Cell that doesn’t unfurl gradually, but rather coils itself into a tight spring. Over a taut, irresistible guitar riff, Tullgren turns boredom into destruction: “In the kitchen melting Legos,” they sing, mimicking the liquefied sound of their guitar. It’s a well-wound pop song that seems to be the album’s outlier, until two minutes in, when the song unreels itself into aimless ugliness. Instead of capping off a neat tune with a satisfying ending, they forgo beauty—something they clearly distrust—for the sake of conveying their mercurial state. Tullgren taps at their guitar in a kind of frantic inertia, undoing the twists of the song’s first half. While it’s split almost perfectly into two-minute segments, the second half feels noticeably longer.
Free Cell has a way of drawing out the minutes. The album plays at the same rate as a long afternoon, when boredom turns to drowsiness. The result isn’t so much an exercise in the ability to withstand tedium, but a study of the nuances of torpor, which often grips with a captivating haze. “Guess I gotta blend some time,” they sing on “Saiddone,” collapsing the concept until it’s nonsensical: “Sometime it’s right now, sometimes it’s next week, sometime October.” Tullgren suspends meaning, shaping vowel sounds so ambiguous that it’s almost impossible to comprehend the words until the end of each sentence. The effect puts the listener in a soupy headspace. Listening to Free Cell feels like standing up too quickly—when all the world feels like it’s on playback half a second too slow.
