Heather Woods Broderick’s Glider is for the weary. It’s for those who speculate where the time has gone, who hope someday to put their feet on the floor and feel something real, who feel kept in the dark by the ones they love. The record plays like the musical equivalent of an Andrew Wyeth painting: cold and dreary, rooted in an Americana sensibility that’s completely vague in its specific hardships but crystal clear in conveying the sheer lack of company, light, and happiness.
Broderick is an accomplished musician and singer in Portland’s folk-music scene, having been a member of groups like Horse Feathers (along with her brother, Peter Broderick), Loch Lomond, and backing bands for artists like Alela Diane and Sharon Van Etten. And it’s been nearly seven years since her debut record From The Ground, which played like a more 2000s indie effort from the likes of Mirah, with sparser compositions and tone that made use of Broderick’s piano, guitar, and cello playing skills. But Glider is darker, less precious, and a record that feels as if it's been bound to a front porch rocking chair for decades now.
In this sense, Glider is really about aura. Broderick’s voice is a loud whisper; you’ll find her, depending on the song, somewhere between Hope Sandoval and Elizabeth Fraser. And with her voice distant and fogged, she builds a skeleton of meaning through earthy and familiar (and therefore perhaps universally devastating in a Rorschach-test sort of way) images and feelings. She’s walked in the shadows, she’s hidden a bad lover’s letters away in drawers, she’s taking what she’s earned because she’s “had enough, enough, enough,” she echoes on the title track. “Never been one to shake my head,” Broderick sings in “Fall Hard”. “I can’t say it feels good.”
It’s from these lyrical glimmers of feeling lost and tired in love and life that Broderick constructs bigger affection through instrumentals. From reverb-heavy piano ballads to grand orchestral compositions that weave in and out of audibility, she does a good job of building walls of sound that still maintain an intimate, bedroom-folk feel. It’s hard to know where Broderick lands as a musician and singer. Although a veteran of a close-knit folk-leaning scene her music isn’t particularly folksy even in an age of throwback singers like Jessica Pratt and Angel Olsen and re-inventors of the genre like Sylvan Esso or Hundred Waters. Her music could easily be of the blanket-label “singer-songwriter” variety but song writing doesn’t seem of great importance to her, at least in the final results of her shrouded vocals. She might be onto a strain of dream-pop, at least one that ditches the synths for strings.
Regardless, her music is deeply familiar, even if it can’t be neatly boxed. On one of the Glider’s strongest tracks, “Wyoming”, Broderick does her best Cocteau Twins impression, with the track ending in an uncharacteristically loud and intense eruption of singing and guitar. Songs like “A Call for Distance” and “Mama Shelter” elevate Broderick’s music to a more soulful plane in their quick, jazz percussion and bass-lines, the latter with just the slightest echo of dancehall flair. The album’s closing sound, “All for a Love”, is an unmistakable, slowed-down sister to touring mate Sharon Van Etten’s “Tarifa”, even in its saxophone.
And maybe it’s this familiarity that keeps Glider feeling stilted. The record walks well-treaded territory lyrically and musically. It almost feels like Broderick is imitating a Walden-esque romance of loneliness in the desert or the pines rather than crafting her own, or at least effectively and personally staking her place in it. Because while Broderick has the tool-kit to make a very pretty and sad sounding-record, nothing she builds here seems to really pierce anywhere where it actually hurts.
