Bnny – Jessica Viscius and fellow touring band members – explore a mere eleven of them on One Million Love Songs but each composition refracts in a translucent light and these fragments resonate. As listeners, we grab facets and write in the missing nine hundred ninety-nine, odd thousand stories for ourselves.
Viscius has chosen to look at love head-on and meet it for what it can be, painful, stupid, ridiculous, affirming, etc. The opening song “Missing” is a very fragile creature. In the wake of her debut album Everything, shot full of heartache, pain, and the loss of her former partner Trey Gruber it barely broke a whisper and the sparse instrumentation was almost reluctant to give her tragedy a voice.
She could so easily be examining those themes again but by the time the first soft and timid track gives way to “Good Stuff,” we are awakened from that slumber trying to move onto something new. “I still remember the first time you said you loved me,” this time around we’re looking at love afresh. It’s a brighter, sunnier look at the possibility of loving after a broken heart, after loss. The song’s fleshed out with breezy 90s synths and a major key vocal lift. If optimism was a song this would be it, “I’m hanging on to the sunshine,” she sings with an almost giddy awareness of how good it feels.
As much as romantic love – and its counterpoint wondering if you are loveable – play a large part in the album lyrically there’s also room for self-love as Viscius voices a self-assured calm on “Something Blue”. “Screaming, Dreaming” is a brasher, less introspective tune that captures something of both the suffocating and liberating feeling of love in any form. “Sweet” dips into self-doubt. “Baby you’re too good for me”, it’s a thick dose of reality and represents the rollercoaster that being in love rides.
Looked at as a whole the vibe is one of positivity, looking back it takes the great memories as the ‘truth’ and faces any negative reminiscences with stoic struggling, either due to self-preservation or genuinely taking that new course. It’s new ground for Bnny certainly but something age-old in songwriting and a lot of empathy comes from the audience in terms of how much we can be made to care.
By the time “Changes” comes around with its gauzy Mazzy Star feel the world is new. “Get It Right” is a raw cacophonous bellow but lacking any self-pity, it’s knowing and wry. There are times throughout that Viscius appears at ease and elsewhere there are signs she’s simply exhausted and drained. All cried out. But as the album ebbs away with the hushed tones of her singing, “No one loves me anymore” on “No One” it’s as if a huge burden has lifted, finally.
