Skullcrusher, the ambient folk project of Los Angeles-based, New York State-raised musician Helen Ballentine, is soft and subtle. Her lyrics are intimate, and when she sings it feels as if she is making unsparing eye contact. While the acoustic confessionalism of her debut EP Skullcrusher isn’t terribly original, it is nonetheless lovely, captivating, and quietly devastating.
It’s tempting to lump Ballentine’s music in with that of Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers, but spiritually Skullcrusher is closer to Phil Elverum’s work as the Microphones, with its tendency towards spectral ambiance and steak tartare-level rawness. Opener “Places/Plans” showcases Ballentine’s multi-tracked vocals alongside a simple acoustic guitar chord progression. “Do you think that I’m going places?” she asks with a tinge of irony, following the question with another more heartbreaking: “Does it matter if I’m a really good friend? That I’m there when you call and when your shows end?” The words are straightforward and to the point. With the exception of an overdubbed synthesizer that glows softly as old headlights, the arrangements are sparse.
Ballentine writes about first loves burdened by discomfort and paralyzing uncertainty. On the brief “Two Weeks in December,” she sings about a first encounter with a romantic prospect that eventually turned sour. “I looked cool rolling cigarettes/You were fooled by my jokes/I was too/I didn’t know you,” she sings sadly. You can practically hear her hands move up and down the neck of her guitar, creaking like wooden floorboards. The vast empty spaces between her words can make it sound as though Ballentine is pausing to omit identifying details as she reads directly from a diary. First kisses and first dates often lie, she seems to say, and the versions of ourselves we present to potential partners aren’t entirely real.
Skullcrusher is just a sketch. The EP is less than 15 minutes long; you could grab a glass of water and make your bed and have made it most of the way through these four songs. But “Trace,” a song that feels like the final embrace at the end of a relationship far past its sell-by date, shows Ballentine inching towards something more fleshed out. “When you come over/You don’t ask me how my day went,” she sings in a moment of stasis, before banjos, synthesizers, and bleary-eyed guitars triumphantly coalesce. She questions what it means to stay, and whether or not things will fall apart the second she gets up to leave. But instead of retreating into the shadows of uncertainty and unhappiness, Ballentine takes flight. There are no identifying details to cling to here—just shades of feeling so strikingly familiar that Ballentine might as well be singing about you.
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Buy: Rough Trade
