Jennifer Castle is an enigma hiding in plain sight. On the surface, she’s a Canadian singer/songwriter like so many others, often performing with just a guitar and a stool, singing songs that conjure bygone country, folk, and blues traditions and that are lyrically steeped in richly detailed agrarian scenery and the travails of being a working mom. But Castle’s music is not so much of the earth as floating above it, untethered to the natural order of time and space and often eschewing typical verse/chorus/verse structure to roam according to its own wandering spirit. As Lou Reed famously sang, “between thought and expression lies a lifetime,” and that’s where Jennifer Castle’s songs live—that grey area where observation mutates into rumination, and where the physical world dissolves into psychic terrain.
Castle's career path has similarly defied linear logic: After recording two albums as Castlemusic, the Toronto-based singer began releasing albums under own name in 2011, the first of which was titled, somewhat confusingly, Castlemusic. (In that time, she also became an in-demand guest vocalist, appearing on albums by local luminaries ranging from Doug Paisley to Fucked Up.) But as is the case with formerly aliased songwriters like Will Oldham and Bill Callahan, the birth-name reclamation has coincided with a greater focus and clarity. Pink City is both Castle’s most warmly intimate and sonically immaculate work to date, forgoing Castlemusic’s naturally psychedelic reverb for a pristine, chamber-pop presentation that places Castle’s radiant voice front and center, amid malleable instrumental backdrops that introduce subtle shifts to substantive effect. Backed by Owen Pallett's palatial string arrangements and a gaggle of veteran Toronto players who’ve long straddled the boundary between the city’s indie-rock and improv-jazz scenes, Pink City is the sound of Castle hitting the pause button on the universe to linger on the beauty and absurdity of the everyday.
For newcomers, Castle exudes an instantly familiar quality: her melding of classic '70s AM-radio gold sounds and indie-schooled idiosyncracies imagines Joni Mitchell on Drag City, while her nocturnal reveries often bring to mind Neko Case—not in voice, but in the way her songs feel both desolate and expansive at the same time, invoking bucolic scenery not to merely admire the view, but to emphasize our humble position within it. (If Case was to ever issue a sequel to Canadian Amp, the daydreamy piano-based serenade “Nature” would be a prime candidate.) But Castle’s deceptively sweet, wry lyricism project her peculiar personality on a widescreen scale, with Pallett’s string swells serving as the portal between her inner and outer worlds. The opening “Truth Is the Freshest Fruit” establishes an idyllic scene of flower-haired hippies frolicking in San Francisco’s Golden Gate park, but it ultimately represents a faded portrait of bliss that Castle can only dream of attaining; as Pallett’s orchestral shrieks pierce through the mix like an encroaching migraine, Castle repeats the line “born at the end of the year” with all the ennui of someone who’s endured a lifetime of having their birthday overshadowed by Christmas and who’s never enjoyed a celebratory piece of cake in the summer sun.
Similarly dispiriting images abound on Pink City, from the communal farmhouse dinner scene on the pedal-steel-powered “Sparta” that will soon be blotted out by the coming winter (whose chilly gusts are summoned with an “Undun”-worthy flute solo), to the helpless, childless narrator of “Nature” who’s resigned to her lot in life. (“I lift my skirt/ For the economy.”) And yet Pink City rarely feels like a downer of a record; with the exception of the incongruously melodramatic “Broken Vase” (and its “Riders on the Storm”-like vibraphone trickles), Castle isn’t so much interested in mining despair as the fortitude required to overcome it. (Even if you're in absolutely no financial position to quit your day job and buy a houseboat, the soft-rockin' escapist anthem “Sailing Away” will at least help you keep the dream alive a little while longer.)
In Castle’s hands, even the most seemingly mundane scenes of domestic drudgery simmer with hot-blooded suggestion: the fingerpicked folk narrative “How or Why” is a tale of flora and fawning, functioning as both botany lesson ("digging holes in December means tulips in May") and an affectionate account of a brief, torrid whirlwind affair. Tellingly, the closing title track revisits the same soil, but long after its nutrients have dried out: “Your old gardens remind me of what’s new in my life,” Castle sings over a sax-smoked cabaret torch song. But even as she treads upon dead earth, Castle’s connection to nature is potent as ever: with Pink City, she reminds us of how good it feels to be alive, even when life gets in the way.
