The first single from Little Scream’s second album recasts Laurel Sprengelmeyer as a Bee Gees-indebted art-popper on the grind. The Iowa-born, Montreal-dwelling artist sings in a high, breathy register about fooled hearts and the gift of dance, the flirtatious atmosphere stoked by cheeky guitar and a synth that stutters and slides like a broken zipper. Her 2011 debut, The Golden Record, featured a fair range of guitar-oriented styles—choral post-punk, desert ballads, Horses-indebted spirituals—but nothing as pure pop as this.
Rather than a reinvention, though, “Love As a Weapon” is another string to Sprengelmeyer’s considerable bow, and on Cult Following, the wealth of styles—tarnished guitar, midnight-hued synths, Eno-indebted balladry—are all pointed in the same direction. To make clear that the record is offering up an alternate reality, the opening interlude is called “Welcome to the Brain,” a spooky riff on the drone of an ensemble tuning up. One song flows into the next, and there are three more interludes across the album’s dozen tracks. Sprengelmeyer brings a similar sense of destination to her individual songs, which rarely end where they started.
On The Golden Record, she tilted towards great booming crescendos. Here, she makes agile and surprising shifts between joy, chaos, and vulnerability in the space of a single track. The centerpiece is “Evan,” a song bookended with its own interludes—an ebullient introduction and a haunted outro—which in turn encompasses all her strengths. It starts out as a gentle lullaby, her voice shoring up the melody until it accrues enough chutzpah to turn into a kind of gospel country song. Then thunder strikes, piercing strings swirl, and her vocal refrain takes on a frenzied intensity. Better still is its dark aftermath, “The Kissing,” where Sprengelmeyer’s soft guitar finds its stakes in clangs of staticky fury, a yowling, borderline-prog solo, followed by a choir’s medicated coos, which linger like fallout.
Cult Following is beautifully orchestrated, and one of the rare records where the lavish arrangements feel fully in service of the songs, rather than like stage decoration. (You could sell the record on its guests—Sufjan Stevens, Sharon Van Etten, the National’s Dessner brothers, TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone, cult Canadian singer Mary Margaret O’Hara—except you can hardly pick them out; they lend their skills rather than personalities.) Sprengelmeyer co-produced with Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry, and they make subtle use of panning and scale to swirl the listener right into the world they’ve created, which hits hard without sacrificing on elegance.
In one of the record’s most moving moments, Sprengelmeyer adopts a girlish, scared voice to countenance the possibility of redemption, and of reconciling hurt: “If there are memories I wanna burn/What happens to the ones that I like to keep?” she sings, evoking Bat for Lashes at her most forlorn. “What if my best memories are dreams? Do I get to keep these? Please?” She ends the charade on “Silent Moon,” an eerie, tremulous lament, like Morricone or Angelo Badalamenti arranging for Karen Dalton: “What I loved in you was just projection/A kind rendering of imperfection,” Sprengelmeyer admits, sadly. “Once I saw what was true/There was not much left of you/I’m afraid.”
The record is fluid, but front-loaded. After “The Kissing,” an eerie, dreamy mood sets in, and the intensity wavers. But while Sprengelmeyer sacrifices the impact of her second record by stacking uncompromising pop songs at the front and dreamier musings towards the back, her story is tantalizingly non-linear and elliptical. Cult Following is a captivating enquiry into the unrelatability of desire, but the conclusiveness of the hurt it can wreak. When it hits, there’s nothing like it.
