Everything blooms on Written Into Changes, the second album by Avalon Emerson & the Charm. The lyrics contain references to Roman gods, invocations of dozens of stars, and images of “incandescent fire in motion.” The tracklist includes songs set in every season and a sonnet-like ode to an ice-cold Staropramen. Every image is bright and filled with motion, and more often than not, used to convey some kind of small tragedy: the realization that time is passing; that a relationship has run its course; that every new thrill and joy is, ultimately, ephemeral. “How dare it hit the spot?” the Berliner-turned-upstate-New-Yorker Emerson wonders of the aforementioned beer, seemingly in pained acknowledgement that beers will continue daring to hit the spot long after her human body has become dust.
“How Dare This Beer,” a lilting, intensely lovely little song toward the end of Written Into Changes, typifies the album’s approach. Emerson likes to temper the earthy anxieties of her lyrics with the acknowledgement that life is, fundamentally, beautiful, and matches that sensibility with production that’s peppy without feeling overbearing. (Perhaps it’s an application of her day job’s clubber optimism—Emerson is best known as a celebrated techno DJ—to the gloomy self-seriousness of indie rock.)
On “Eden”, the record’s ginormous, funky opener, the protagonist is trying to patch up a relationship that’s on the rocks. The production is churning and excitable, and Emerson sings that the object of her affection is “still my favorite place in Eden”—not her entire world, but the best part of something already great. On “Happy Birthday,” the stress of knowing that you’ve “wasted all these years/Collecting and perfecting this game” is pushed aside in favor of a party with “all the people you love.” These love songs, despite their fantastical imagery, have an oaky pragmatism; they feel, endearingly, like songs for grownups, filled with warm compromises and acknowledgments that life keeps going even when it feels like it won’t.
Emerson is a much more specific songwriter this time around: She likes romantic, florid images, and she can turn a song like “Jupiter and Mars,” ostensibly about a romance that never quite gels, into something that feels dynamic and resplendent. The production of Written Into Changes matches the new scope of her lyrics. “Jupiter and Mars” is a punchy, instant-gratification-era take on the Cocteau Twins at their most spectral, echoing guitars and spangly synth lines dancing around Emerson’s vocal like fireflies on a hot summer night. “I Don’t Wanna Fight” is like an angsty ’90s radio rock hit done up in primary colors, Emerson’s protest that “I don’t wanna fight anymore” gilded with punchy riffs that have a tongue-in-cheek sense of drama.
These songs are bright and bold, and although they essentially iterate on the misty dream pop of her previous album, 2023’s & the Charm, the difference feels stark when you return to that album; it sounds positively miniscule in comparison. All the bigness is a thrill, and it makes lyrics that are low-key on paper—“Heading to your extended family/Driving on the interstate to New Jersey”—sound positively life or death. Then again, as Emerson makes clear over and over again on Written Into Changes, life is nothing but a short interlude between being born and dying. Maybe the stakes really are that high.
