Jessica Lea Mayfield’s third album opens with the loud, percussive crunch and grind of an electric guitar, thudding loudly and precipitously—definitely the most intrusive sound to creep its way into any of her songs. That opening volley of “Oblivious” sounds like a school bus falling into a ravine, or perhaps a piece of rusted machinery designed to cleave and separate this album from its predecessors in Mayfield’s small catalog. For eight years now, the Ohio singer/songwriter has proved one of the more intriguing artists on the fringes of alt-country, with a blurry, slurry vocal delivery and a wry lyrical style that allows for a very frank cataloging of romantic regrets and bad decisions. Yet, she slams her fingers against the strings on “Oblivious” so hard that she effectively unmoors herself from the confines and concerns of country-based songwriting. She is entering new territory that is perhaps a bit more idiosyncratic, a bit more extreme, a bit less well behaved.
This is the only dramatic addition to her sound on her new album, Make My Head Sing.... Otherwise, the record represents a careful subtraction of instruments and elements until only the basics remain: voice and guitar, drums and bass. It's her first without Dan Auerbach at the helm, but ironically it’s the album that best captures the minimalist rock ethos of the Black Keys. Co-producing with her bass player and husband Jesse Newport, Mayfield keeps the sound loose and roomy, preserving the effect of three musicians huddled in a cramped practice space. There’s something certainly compelling about this raw, minimalist sound, even if it buffs away the wry twang in her vocals and shifts the focus away from her songwriting.
In fact, the difference between Make My Head Sing... and Mayfield’s previous records may be as simple as the difference between a guitar album and a singer/songwriter album. The focus here is squarely on the guitar, and there’s an intriguing messiness to her playing, a sculptural approach that favors rough surfaces and sharp edges. After the gangly metal crunch of opener “Oblivious” comes the murky “I Wanna Love You”; “Pure Stuff” stumbles and surges like an early Nirvana b-side, while the postpunk riff on “Do I Have the Time” shimmers like the sequins on the album cover. Elsewhere, she summons Explosions in the Sky and Dinosaur Jr. Make My Head Sing... can be scattershot and unfocused, but especially after two albums dominated by very distinctive guitarists—Auerbach on With Blasphemy, So Heartfelt and her brother David Mayfield on Tell Me—it’s good to hear her emerge as a resourceful and compelling player herself.
This new musical direction of course informs her lyrical approach, twisting her reverbed psychodrama into something like a variation on the blues. Mayfield favors skeletal song structures and delirious repetition, as though she’s trying to say as much as possible with a few words as possible. On “Standing in the Sun,” that approach conjures a sense of queasy, heatsick regret, especially as Mayfield layers her vocals like she’s going out of focus. But concise does not always mean weighty or evocative. For all its insistence, Make My Head Sing... is strangely slight and ephemeral. These aren’t short songs, but even “Pure Stuff” and “Unknown Big Secret”, both of which lurch past the five-minute mark, sound like they’re over before Mayfield has a chance to unspool her ideas adequately.
Perhaps that’s a consequence of this new sound: She emphasizes the guitar parts to the neglect of every other element. And yet, Mayfield remains an incisive lyricist with a sharp humor that gets underplayed by her deadpan delivery. “I could kill her with the power in my mind, but I’m a good humanitarian,” she sings on “Oblivious,” dismembering that unwieldy word at the joints as she shoots daggers at the other female corner in a love triangle. On closer “Seein* Starz”, she tells a man, “You’ve got a stranglehold on my heart.” Mayfield has insisted for years that love is treacherous and obliterating, and on Make My Head Sing... her guitar enacts that romantic violence. It provides an intriguing counterpart to her vocals, turning her inner monologues into something like an argument.
