Online, thirsty people take masochism to delightful extremes. They honk for their crushes to punch them in the face, steamroll them with a car, or batter them with a 16" cast-iron skillet. New York singer-songwriter Emily Yacina makes this type of boiling, uneven desire sound prosaic: “Yeah I need you to swallow me,” she sings mildly over bobbing chord progressions on “Arcades & Highways,” as if rattling off a grocery list or picking lint off of a sweater. The mousy and withdrawn indie-pop on Remember the Silver, her new album, rests on this crooked pairing. On one hand, there’s a longing so all-consuming that it threatens to extinguish her; on the other, a dry and often listless delivery.
The title of the album originates from a Dana Redfield book about alien abduction. Like a UFO, Yacina implies, love can disappear in an instant, but it was real; you must remember how it felt. And so, Remember the Silver dwells on these tender ache of romance, at once swooning with promises to “wait forever” and whimpering at lost intimacies. Wisps of past loves slip between her fingers: She imagines them on the beach, on 96th Street, in her bedroom. “Time is a silk web tangled in pleas/I choke to move on,” she admits over muted, scratchy guitars in “Bleachers.”
But who is she straining to move on from? The sources of her anguish are as blank as paper dolls; it’s like they’re not real people, but only closed-off figments of her memory. The closest we get to specificity are gestures to “the most perfect face” or “all the little things you’d say to cheer me up.” Instead, her lyrics tend toward flat lines of monosyllabic words, vague and impressionistic notes bound up in juvenile rhyme schemes. On “Secret Drawers,” she concocts a spell to lure in her crush: “With a drop of blood, I say your name/Like I knew it would, it makes a stain.” On “Better Off,” she tackles self-delusion with fairy tale references to birds singing and prayers to the sky. Her attempts at profundity devolve into fluff: “I feel my angels stretch me soft/Whisper to myself that I’m better off.”
Of course, even the most seemingly understated, opaque lines can be rescued and imbued with larger meaning. “Southern Sky” by frequent collaborator (Sandy) Alex G, on which Yacina contributes gentle vocals, spins in her same universe of swallowed-down emotional realities. The two artists share a language: dreams and skies, blues and greens. But the vivid landscape of “Southern Sky,” with its ensemble of wheezing violins, tambourines, and jaunty piano keys, makes a simple observation like “You and me/These are titles I can hardly speak” ache with nostalgia. By contrast, the emotions in Remember the Silver feel weakly brewed; the slow-moving, monotonous arrangements do little to reveal any expressive subtlety. Yacina’s papery singing rarely elevates above a murmur, often blending into the dinky and minimal instrumentation: some drums, some lightly pawed-at guitars. Occasionally, there is a sprinkle of trombone or electronic whirrs like a quickening heartbeat. But mostly, everything is rendered in the same pallid shade.
Remembering that you are a young woman with real, unregulated emotions is mortifying; it can make you want to eject yourself straight into the mouth of a great white shark. As I listened, I kept searching for a sharper, more complex female subjectivity—a perspective to match Frankie Cosmos’ weird and existential wit, Sidney Gish’s offbeat self-deprecation, or Soccer Mommy’s snarling cool. I wanted a deeper sense of how slippery, heady, and frightening new love can be, at a time when young women have turned out in droves to describe that experience beautifully. There are refreshing glimpses at the mundane humiliations of having a crush on songs like “Only,” whose sly opening line—“Desexualize my soul/I want to be a piece of paper”—scans as a more composed way of saying “fuck my life.” And Yacina’s trembling moans on “96th Street,” manage to bathe the listener in a quiet grief, despite the song’s generic lyrics. But as a whole, Remember the Silver is crumbly and pale like a bouquet of dried flowers. I wish I’d been given more to remember.
