What you might notice first on Alex, the sophomore record from Daughter of Swords, the project of Alex Sauser-Monnig, is discordance: From track to track, verse to verse, no two songs here sound alike in tone or texture. For an artist with roots in Americana and folk music’s traditions, Alex reads as distinctly modern, except on songs where it instead reads as retro, or on the ones where each of these flavors of past and present collide, like three dogs headbutting each other while scrambling for the same tennis ball.
Pay close attention, and that’s what you’ll likely hear second on Alex—not the delightful “bonk” of coconuts cracking together, but a certain playfulness Sauser-Monnig uses to thread the album into a cohesive whole. One moment, she’s invoking the hollowed out electric hum of synth-forward 1980s New Wave on tracks like “Hard On”; the next, she’s playing the best Courtney Barnett song that Courtney Barnett didn’t actually write, à la “All I Want is You”; then, she’s stripping away everything present elsewhere on the record that suggests exterior influences, holding space for herself that she can share with her listeners, like during the album’s penultimate track, “Song”—which does what it says on the tin by humbling us with Sauser-Monnig’s tender vulnerability. “Sing me a song to cry to / a song to live through,” she chimes gently on its final lines as she plucks away at her acoustic guitar.
This is the closest Alex comes to directly pointing to our Interesting Times™, though the track’s grasp of directness, frankly, is nonetheless very indirect. It’d be something of a smarmy statement of the obvious to characterize the album as “personal,” because yes, that’s baked right into the title; at the same time, Alex looks inward, and one may need to reach to find any kind of political allegory woven into Sauser-Monnig’s lyrics. There is no denying the cathartic power of a song we can use as an emotional release valve, and “Song,” as cheekily named as it is, provides us with that outlet. After around 23 or so minutes of genre-defying experimentation, being given permission to weep, or endure, is a welcome gift.
Those 23 minutes are a lot of fun, to be clear, and it’s not as if “Song” is the record’s first break from Sauser-Monnig’s aesthetic loop-the-loops; that would be “Willow,” which is comparatively more encumbered on account of its piano and drum accompaniments. It feels telling that Alex’s buzzier, upbeat and up-tempo stretch hits when Sauser-Monnig is, in some ways, at her freest and most open, singing about the intoxicating, irresistible pull of sexual attraction, intimate chemistry, and a nagging, inconvenient (but undeniable) need for one-on-one time with the object of your affections; “Alone Together” and “Talk to You,” Alex’s opening duo, burst with dizzying joy at the sensation of being infatuated with someone, painting a picture about love and desire and yearning that the rest of the album isn’t interested in satisfying.
Alex is about measuring Sauser-Monnig’s circumference. It’s observational, and a bit of a self-portrait, perhaps—but her approach to songwriting for Daughter of Swords tends to render those pieces of the record that are specific to her into universal terms. Taking the opposite tack and making the work solely about her would be confining, and the way that Sauser-Monnig adjusts and fiddles with varied familiar sonic qualities to suit herself—her perspective, her style, her voice—suggests an artist determined to hang onto her freedom.
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can find his collected work at “his personal blog.” He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.
