Terms like “easy listening” and “adult contemporary” get a bad rap, perhaps unfairly so. These genre descriptors don’t connote much that’s cool or experimental, more suited to tea with your aunt than a raucous night out in a dark, sweaty bar—the kind of places where New York musician Julia Cumming cut her teeth. She’s spent over a decade singing and playing bass in the prodigious indie-rock outfit Sunflower Bean and walking runways as a model. Before that, when she was just 13 years old, she was one-third of the twee pop band Supercute!, which was my own first encounter with Cumming’s music (as is the case with so many of my teenage musical discoveries, all roads lead back to Rookiemag).
Cumming’s music was something I sort of grew up with—I was a high schooler in New York at the same time as her, lucky enough to be on the periphery of a youth arts movement full of teenage girls just like Julia making the DIY scene their own. A few years later, Sunflower Bean records helped soundtrack my college years, and I’d admired the quantity and quality of their output in the years that followed. This is all to say that Julia Cumming has already conquered cool. She’s turned over cool so many times, examined it from every angle, and now, at 30, after more than half her life spent onstage, she’s freed herself from it on her solo debut.
It makes sense that Cumming would seek reprieve in softer sounds. She’s got a truly remarkable voice—smooth and pliable and brimming with poise—and over the course of her career she’s demonstrated just how versatile it is. While I love hearing it accompanied by the slam of a hard-and-fast punk song or some upbeat bubblegum pop, it’s intriguing to hear her try on some more stripped-back arrangements that let her range and expressibility be the focal point.
Julia feels like a throwback to the golden age of even-tempered coffee-shop pop, when airwaves were ruled by Norah Jones, Jason Mraz, Sheryl Crow, and Dave Matthews Band. Cumming brings this mellowed-out sound to life in her more dissonant songs, whose instrumentals are contrasted with lyrics that reveal a darker, more anxious underbelly. Beneath the sunny swing and sleek, catchy guitar licks of “Ruled By Fear” is a dissection of Cumming’s struggles with self-doubt and OCD (a diagnosis she received while writing the record). “Hollywood Communication” is a bright and breezy piece of soft rock informed by her experiences in the music and fashion industries. Her cool-girl demeanor breaks down in the lyrics, but that same insecurity never shows in her delivery of them. Instead, her composure mirrors the endless maintenance that goes into not only keeping up the facade, but the identity breakdown that happens slowly and without realization when the cameras are turned off. “Forgive me for that situation / I wasn’t myself at the time,” she sings. “Or maybe I was too much and I can’t accept what’s mine.” Its ending note is one of acceptance: “I like the way the other kids stare / It don’t make me scared.”
Both “Revel in the Knowledge” and “Please Let Me Remember This” start small, zooming in on intimate details of a scene between two lovers before zooming out in an existential spiral underscored by dreamy, disco-inflected soft-rock. But the best tracks on Julia are the ones where Cumming breaks form, injecting a discordant rhythm (“I Dream of a Fire that Stays Burning…”) or a rowdy shred (“Do It All Again”). The chorus of “Forget the Rest” ups the energy for what should be a big finish—it’s one of Julia’s best hooks, but the downside is that instead of returning one last time, the track (and by extension, the album) ends rather abruptly, feeling unfinished. These more energetic, unpredictable moments come as a welcome surprise, a reminder that there’s always something more lurking beneath the cool exterior, that it’s not just chill vibes all the way down. [Partisan]
Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.
