Aly Spaltro isn't a teenager anymore, but she was when she wrote much of her Lady Lamb the Beekeeper debut, 2013's Ripely Pine. That album didn't sound like the emergence of a college-aged songwriter so much as it played like an experiment from someone who had already gotten good at putting music together. Full of nerves and breath and blood, Ripely Pine whipped folk tropes into rock'n'roll rambunctiousness, giving her plenty of space to sound precocious. On her second album, After, Spaltro hits one of the unexpected truths of your twenties: that embracing your repressed childlike instincts is one of the more adult things you can do.
Ripely Pine struck out big, with elegant metaphors rooted in the natural world. After's track list includes a song called "Milk Duds", suggesting that Lady Lamb's tone has shifted from Ripely's seven-minute ballad "You Are the Apple". "We fell asleep on a box of Milk Duds," she sings on the new song. "They melted into the clubhouse cushions/ I never loved another person/ More than I loved you when I woke that morning." That sticky mess doesn't make the prettiest image in the traditional sense, but Spaltro's probably the first songwriter to find a symbol of her love in a pile of chocolate and caramel and polyester. She's getting braver.
After is heartsick to its core—the title seems to eulogize a love affair in a single word—but it's much rowdier than its lyrics alone would imply. On opener "Vena Cava", Spaltro looks at her sleeping partner and sees the fiery death of their relationship as though it's already happening in slow motion all around her. "I can feel how the seams of your ribs will separate from the seams of my ribs," she sings. "I know already how much TV will fail to comfort me in your absence." She switches from two ribcages unraveling to a melancholic Netflix binge in one line. And the song's a jam to boot.
Her lyrical muscle lets Lady Lamb oscillate between the visceral and the mundane without so much as a knowing lilt in her voice. Both modes come easily to her, and the tension between them is fertile. There's a parallel tension in the music, too: The strongest songs on After verge on acoustic despondency only to break into a big, crunchy chorus. You can always weep out the pain, but sometimes it's so much more fun to mosh it off.
There are plenty of startling moments full of guts and gristle in Lady Lamb's dense lyrics, and then there are the moments when she wanders. The fingerpicked "Sunday Shoes" stretches out between the shoegaze-inflected "Heretic" and "Spat Out Spit", injecting a weird bubble of space into the album's flow. The rousing coda on "Penny Licks" almost feels like an Arcade Fire climax, even though it only arrives in the seventh song. Like Ripely Pine, After clocks in at a solid hour—and it's an hour you'll feel, because while After boasts a stacked lineup of well-crafted songs, it's a choppy ride to make it through them all.
