From a storm to a haven, a jolt to a caress: There is a sharp tonal shift from Anjimile’s second studio album to his third. While 2023’s The King dropped the listener into a tangled web of choral vocals and furiously hammered acoustic guitar, You’re Free to Go drifts off down a path of silken melodic lines and the singer’s serene and luminous voice, the work of an artist who has opened up to love. “There is something/Like a new being/Growing on me,” Anjimile sings on “You're Free To Go,” the title track, and this is the album in a nutshell: a rejuvenating work of artistic honesty and impeccable songwriting.
You’re Free to Go is not all jubilation, glee, and sweet release. The subtly haunting “Exquisite Skeleton” explores familial estrangement, while “Enough” is the sound of an artist bone-weary and at the end of their tether. But the record is far less gothic than its predecessor, less obviously pained. In this, You’re Free to Go resembles more the freak-folk of Anjimile’s debut studio album Giver Taker, a record of finger-picked guitar and simple synth motifs. You’re Free to Go, however, takes Giver Taker’s sometimes nonchalant approach and strolls with it under the loving sun.
At times You’re Free to Go feels like a fairly conventional work. The basic palette of acoustic guitars, lazy synths, and sparse drums on standout song “Rust & Wire” is reminiscent of Moon Safari-era Air—think the gorgeously languid “All I Need”—or the Shins at their most listless. “Like You Really Mean It,” with its filtered synth intro and 4/4 kick drum, sounds for all the world like a Top 40 radio hit—an adventurous one, sure—down to its rousing middle eight of “Come on, baby,” which you could almost imagine a pumped-up sports crowd singing.
When the result is as effortlessly moving as “Rust & Wire” or sung as tenderly as “Exquisite Skeleton,” the suggestion of conventionality matters not a jot. Anjimile has never been in better voice, his breezy vibrato falling in the glorious shade between Sufjan Stevens and Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser. But there are some songs—“Ready or Not” or “Afarin,” for example—that slip by a little too easily, the melodies a touch too generic, the musical backing unremarkable. The chorus of “Ready or not/Here I come,” on the former, feels like it needs a far stronger tune to lift it out of cliché. When the unlikely specter of Isn't Anything-era My Bloody Valentine drifts into occasional view, courtesy of pillowy guitar feedback on “Waits For Me” and “The Store,” the contrast is as welcome as it is unexpected.
Most of all, though, You’re Free to Go" showcases Anjimile’s emotional range as a songwriter, able to shift between moods from joy to paranoia to despair in a devastating instant. “Waits For Me” has an almost effortless grandeur, puffed up on a melody that feels inevitable but never obvious; “You’re Free To Go” is finely balanced between defiance and vulnerability, with a gorgeous descending guitar motif and perfectly cathartic chorus; and “Point of View” demonstrates an almost manipulative brilliance in the way it shifts from anger to tenderness, from chord to chord. The subtle change from “When I was a little girl, I wanted to be free” in the opening verse of “Waits For Me” to “When I was a little boy, I wanted to be real” in the song’s second verse contains oceans of personal significance, conveyed in a simple lyrical shift.
Anjimile once said that if Giver Taker was an album of prayers, The King was an album of curses. You’re Free To Go is nothing so obviously extreme, an album of simple truths—of light, dark, and all that is in between; of enjoying easy comforts when they come. Not so much a return as a rebirth, You’re Free To Go is the sound of an artist sloughing off old skin and returning at his powerful best.
