On 2013's Bent Nail EP, Palehound's Ellen Kempner sang about taking a carrot for a pet in order to stave off late-teen loneliness. She makes similarly childlike gestures on her debut album. "You made beauty a monster to me, so I'm kissing all the ugly things I see," she seethes at an ex in a so there voice on Dry Food's title track. It's the most deliciously futile form of revenge and reclamation: doing the opposite.
Dry Food is partially a product of the 21-year-old Boston-dwelling songwriter's first big breakup—the deeper kind of solitude of having known and lost someone. Its sound captures the Herculean efforts required to survive the ensuing slump: "All I need's a little sleep and I'll be good to clean and eat," she sings in a medicated sigh on "Easy", her acoustic guitar rising and dipping with the methodical pace of someone trying to make a new routine stick. But like her former camp counselor and roommate, Speedy Ortiz's Sadie Dupuis, Kempner never lets a sad jam wallow: she kicks the end of the song into shape with a zippy electric guitar motif and some awkward, itchy squall.
It's followed by "Cinnamon", which takes the opposite tack, hooked around the kind of amiable, waterlogged psych burble that Mac DeMarco noodles in his sleep. Kempner sings dreamily about her worst self-defeating impulses, but is stirred from her reverie by a divine revelation that her life is becoming "a pretty lie". Frantic drums force the song somewhere agitated and ascendant, but instead of bursting into some bright new phrase, the furor falls away like a captivating slo-mo bellyflop.
Kempner has a knack for these odd little about-turns that elevate Dry Food above the usual plainspoken acoustic indie fare. And like her old roommate, she often obscures her intentions between appealingly twisty language. "Mouth ajar watching cuties hit the half pipe/ I only feel half ripe/ Around healthier folk," she sings on "Healthier Folk". She distils her disgust at her own post-breakup malaise with perfectly understated images: "The hair that's in my shower drain/ Has been clogging up my home," she sings on "Dixie". "And I try to scoop it up, but I wretch until I'm stuck." It's maybe the most straightforward song here, just fingerpicked acoustic guitar, but she messes at it like a cat dragging a mouse into a dark nook.
Saddest of all is closer "Seakonk", where Kempner protests that she's not alone, actually; she's home watching TV with her parents, sister and their dogs. There's a blithe fairground pirate ship sway to the song, which she closes with a jaunty "doo doo doo" that could have come from the credits of one of the cartoons she's watching—only she lets the final note deflate with a groan. It's at this point that Dry Food confronts the point it's been evading: kidding yourself is no way to recover, and comfort offers little impetus to move on. Palehound's discomfiting, unflinching debut suggests she knew it all along.
