The essential fibers of Julia Holter’s compositions are sturdy yet pliable, amenable to shifts in contour and color. “Goddess Eyes” first appeared on 2011’s Tragedy in subtly exultant form; Ekstasis, released the next year, featured both a blocky rejigging and a retextured version. And on an EP that year, an acoustic “Goddess Eyes” revealed the patient ballad earlier obscured by static. They track Holter’s inclination towards clearer vocals and ensemble ingenuity. It’s as if, as time passes, she’d rather reimagine a song than retrieve its original spirit.
The 32-year-old Los Angeles artist’s latest release, In the Same Room, is a live studio recording of songs largely from her ravishing last two albums, 2013’s Loud City Song and 2015’s Have You in My Wilderness. Some of the players—drummer Corey Fogel, violist Dina Maccabee, and bassist Devin Hoff—are familiar from Holter’s touring outfit and those two records, the strength of which owes much to the musicians’ intuitive, often idiosyncratic groove. In the Same Room is spacious and restrained, at times offering concentrates of the songs’ emotive fundamentals. It’s also further occasion for Holter to sharpen material or else mine it for new meaning.
“Horns Surrounding Me,” on Loud City Song, features a backbeat and shades of terror. It’s nearly arrhythmic on In the Same Room, a mélange of cymbals and viola. Its darkness evokes calm instead of anxiety. The spiraling outro on In the Same Room’s “Silhouette,” meanwhile, intensifies its impending madness. It’s among her most stirring vocal performances, full of melismas on the brink of abandon. “Lucette Stranded on the Island,” sung from the perspective of someone left to die by her lover, makes the earlier version’s noisy climax seem overdone. Unadorned, we hear Holter mid-disenchantment, amorous going on helpless.
Holter has said that producer Cole M. Greif-Neill insisted on bringing her vocals, less thoroughly treated than usual, to the fore of Have You in My Wilderness. In the Same Room, though, lacks that record’s saturated backdrop, leaving Holter’s voice as palpably present as each of the instrumentalists (whose subtle dynamics enliven “In the Green Wild.”) That completes an impressive arc for Holter: from an interior, hermetic-seeming artist to one who can unlock the nuance of her compositions in live ensemble settings.
Which is why I wish In the Same Room—which does feature a couple redundancies, like a familiar “Feel You”—retooled more pre-Loud City Song material. All but two songs are from her last two albums: “Betsy on the Roof” first appeared in similar albeit hazier form on 2010’s Live Recordings; and, more significantly, “So Lilies” returns from 2011’s Tragedy. In place of the album version’s field-recordings and interference, there’s pattering percussion and hesitant bits of melody. What would more of these predominantly electronic, in-the-box recordings sound like as band arrangements? With Holter’s restlessness to reprise, we may yet find out.
