However, Cassandra Jenkins’ 2021 release was also notably dashed with umber tones and grief (coloured by the 2019 suicide of David Berman and birthed during the Covid era). With her new album, My Light, My Destroyer, the singer-songwriter emerges from a persistent, albeit fertile limbo, accessing an inner guide while committing to engage fully with the moment and its disparate contents.
Jenkins’ ability to craft a hook has never been in question. Overview, along with her 2017 debut, Play Till You Win, is chock-full of balmy melodies, as is My Light. “I felt my arms / rise light as feathers”, she announces on opener “Devotion”, describing an epiphany or a milestone catharsis, the song brimming with subtle modulations and well-paced phrasing. With “Delphinium Blue”, Jenkins continues to pivot toward emancipation, offering a refined art-pop take that segues between breathy vocals and inner monologue expressed as spoken-word declarations.
The wildly catchy “Clams Casino” recalls Waxahatchee’s rollicky Americana a la Saint Cloud and Tigers Blood as well as recent work by Hurray for the Riff Raff. “I don’t want to live alone anymore”, Jenkins confesses, reassessing the truth of impermanence and the yearning for connection. As with Overview, the quotidian is a doorway to the sublime or mystical; with My Light, however, joy, eagerness, and Eros are more consistently present.
“Omakase”, meanwhile, frames Jenkins’ voice amidst classically-intoned strings and synths. Occasionally Jenkins’ appreciation for the liminal brings to mind Bat for Lashes’ latest sequence, The Dream of Delphi, or Karima Walker’s Waking the Dreaming Body. The feel is upbeat, one of promise. Throughout Overview, it was as if Jenkins periodically plunged into deep water; “diving into the wreck”, to reference the Adrienne Rich poem. With My Light, she pockets a few gems, glances upwards to behold the sun’s glow bobbing on the surface, and rises resolutely toward it.
“I saw two doves wrapped up in filthy and true love”, she proclaims on “Petco”, asserting a metaphor for the way in which intimacy involves both disorder and beauty, adding, “the dishes pile up / my heart sings.” Navigating an alternately austere and fuzzy soundscape, Jenkins accepts that love and loss are inseparable. This is, of course, an ageless rite of passage; Jenkins, though, makes the perennial journey her own, delivering her reflections and inquiries via distinct stories, melodies, and sonic gestalts.
Jenkins “punches the clock in the face” on “Only One”, attempting to free herself from self-conceptions, biases, and fixed routines. The past and its aftereffects are not fully behind her; that said, she’s processed them to the point that they don’t prevent her from dancing with the present. When she concludes, “You’re the only one I’ve ever loved”, her voice complemented by tasteful horn flourishes, she perhaps addresses an ex or current partner; she could, however, just as easily be extending these words to the universe or life in its broadest sense.
Like many artists before her, Jenkins strives to reconcile paradoxes, embracing mud and sky, day and night, the descent and the reemergence, never losing sight of how compelling a crystalline hook can be. She explores themes that have been relevant at least since the advent of the Cognitive Revolution 30,000-plus years ago – creation, destruction, ecstasy, transcendence – yet does so in her own contemporary, refreshing, and utterly commanding way.
