Danger lingers around the edges of the latest album by Ireland's Brigid Mae Power. She made her past records in empty car parks and churches—the kinds of places where you’re always looking over your shoulder. Her self-titled Tompkins Square debut was recorded in Portland with Peter Broderick, and occupies a liminal space made up of droning guitars, metallic piano reverberations, and lyrics that trace some barely escaped threat. “There were some people around us at the time who weren’t for us/Though they claimed to be,” she sings to her infant son on “Lookin At You in a Photo.” The liturgical haze and her slow, methodical singing give the impression of a woman and single mother learning to trust herself and others again, tentatively adapting to a life where she no longer has to look back every dozen steps.
Like This Mortal Coil, Marissa Nadler, and White Chalk-era PJ Harvey, Power is adept at grounding what could otherwise be quite gossamer music. Sometimes she uses pace and volume, as on opener “It’s Clearing Now,” which spends almost eight minutes creeping in like a storm over the horizon, until it becomes overwhelming and transcendent. “Oh, many, many times to force happiness, I have tried/But I had to be patient in waiting for its movement,” she sings meditatively, while her loosely strummed guitar beckons a whirl of strings. She shades her songs with soured highs and unsettling depths, like the low bass note on “Is It My Low or Yours” and the blast of static that cuts through “Watching the Horses.”
Power is an equally nuanced vocalist. Her voice is agile and exhilarating, conveying all her nervous optimism and frank exhaustion, whether singing monastic drones (“Let Me Hold You Through This”), forlorn ballads (“Is It My Low or Yours”), or Carpenters-indebted melodies. She never comes close to elucidating what it is she escaped, but the aftermath leaves little doubt as to how serious it was. She reveals her coping mechanisms on “I Left Myself for a While,” but rediscovers everything she had locked deep in some internal safe on “Watching the Horses.” Backed by dreamy, subtly cinematic strings, she sings, “I thought I had completely forgotten/But it was in body's memory/I release it now/I am free.”
Despite its clear seriousness, Brigid Mae Power runs on that sense of newfound freedom. Power and Broderick find glimmers of light even in the darkest moments, and she learns to trust the kind of love that enables independence, after some period of coercion. “I feel your intent/I'm not sure of the meaning of it yet,” she sings on final song “How You Feel,” which starts with the sound of her laughter, and unspools in sweet freak-folk sepia that evokes great lost songwriters like Connie Converse. “But nothing, nothing feels bad/And I feel safer than I ever have before.”
