For her sophomore effort, If I Asked For A Picture, Blondshell borrowed a line from that poem to title her album. It’s a fitting point of inspiration for an album centred around change – navigating relationships in disrepair, seeking to draw a line under past mistakes and looking to the future while keeping an eye on the past. Across 12 tracks, reflections of fractured adolescent parental relationships, past experiences of addiction and eulogies for imbalanced romances are given voice over infectious, chugging indie-rock arrangements and rendered with humour and striking honesty by Sabrina Teitelbaum.
Teitelbaum’s 2023 debut as Blondshell evoked the lo-fi debut of her musical hero Liz Phair – not just in terms of sound, but in Teitelbaum’s ability to capture the vast, complex array of emotions and experiences that come with adolescence and entering one’s early twenties. She captured mutually destructive romance on “Olympus”, female rage on the blistering “Salad”, falling in with the wrong crowd of “Dangerous” and navigating addiction, recovery and friendship on “Sober Together”. To listen to Blondshell, the album, was to watch many years pass by in a matter of minutes.
But as Elvis Costello famously told Creem Magazine in 1981, “you have 20 years to write your first album and you have six months to write your second one”. Less than two years after her introduction to most listeners, Teitelbaum returns with her own take on how to navigate the well-documented difficulties of the sophomore record – looking to maintain the intimate, heart-on-sleeve songwriting of her debut, while expanding her sound to create arena-worthy anthems.
The most striking example of this is “T&A”, inspired by
the Rolling Stones’ “Little T&A”, which sees Teitelbaum surrender
to the love of a man she admits is far from being one of “the good ones”
over blown out drums, electric guitar and bass. “23’s A Baby”,
meanwhile, sees Blondshell turn in the most radio-ready melody of her
career thus far, with a sing-song refrain of “23’s a baby / Why’d you
have a baby?”.
If You Asked For A Picture concerns itself
primarily with unhealthy romantic relationships – the focal point of
half of the songs here. But while it’s a rich topic to explore in song, a
sense of repetitiveness does ultimately set in as Teitelbaum circles
around the same themes of codependency and falling in love with
questionable men against one’s own better judgement. Indeed, when the
anthemic melodies of a tune like “T&A” aren’t present these songs
can fail to leave much of an impression; as evidenced on the slow-burn
“Two Times”.
When Teitelbaum looks elsewhere for subject matter, some of
her strongest songwriting comes through. The visceral and gutting
“What’s Fair” examines her damaged relationship with her late mother –
imagining what parts of her adolescence and early-20s her mother would
and wouldn’t approve of. “You’d want me to be famous, so you could live
by proxy,” she sings in one spiky barb, before shortly turning her gaze
inwards: “But I know there’s nothing less perfect to a girl than a mom”.
“23’s A Baby” concerns itself with the same topic, and while the
infectious melody may first distract from it, it also contains some of
the LP’s most affecting lines, as Teitelbaum opines, “You killed me with
your bad habits”, while also admitting, “You know that I still need
you”.
If You Asked’s centre piece is “Event of a Fire”, a
bildungsroman that picks at old wounds and examines the limits of
moving on from one’s past. Taking us back to 2012, the song offers a
kaleidoscopic retelling of drug intoxication, shame, fallouts with
friends and heartbreak over waltzing guitars and drums, splitting the
difference between modern indie-rock, grunge and slowcore. It’s
musically electrifying and lyrically (and vocally) devastating – a
reminder that few can capture the nauseatingly fast rate of change that
comes in ones late teens through their twenties as well as Blondshell.
