An Abundance of Strawberries both is and isn’t a Julia Brown album. While the Maryland-based indie pop outfit intended to record an album in 2014, the band stalled and effectively dissolved, leading frontman Sam Ray to take the reins, recording an album by himself and bringing in past members and anyone who was willing to help finish the job.
Ironically, for an album that was shaped largely by one person, An Abundance of Strawberries exceends the band’s sole demo and single in ambition. Ray pushes past the conventional limitations of "lo-fi indie pop" at every turn: The opening title track begins with Ray's soft singing and a strummed acoustic guitar, before giving way to cymbal crashes and a cavalcade of voices as the song expands and blossoms. Likewise, "The Body Descends" is a near-epic at five minutes, growing from quiet piano chords to Infinity Crush's Caroline White singing along with Ray, her voice melding with his as as viola swells with the drums to create a pristine piece of ballroom pop.
On the surface, An Abundance of Strawberries feels like a continuation of Julia Brown’s old, home-taped sound. "Procession (full)" is full of choppy guitar strums and has a ramshackle quality meant to hide how well put together it is. "All Alone in Bed," with lines like "Does your mother know/ That you’re skin and bones/ Does your mother know/ Those things you do when you’re all alone in bed" over plinked xylophone captures the intimacy, playfulness, and quiet melancholy of To Be Close to You.
But then something like "Snow Day," which is built around an off-kilter drum machine and near-random keyboard notes, draws just as much from the production work Ray does under his Ricky Eat Acid moniker. This quiet experimental runs throughout the album and binds everything together, even at its extremes. "You Can Always Hear the Birds" opens with an out-of-nowhere jungle freak-out before giving way to looping drum crashes and Ray’s Vocoder-masked vocals, yet the album ends on "Bloom," the album’s simplest track: Just Ray and his guitar, reminding everyone the true essence of his work.
An Abundance of Strawberries is a dense collection, but it coheres thanks to Ray's ability to twist a connective melody out of the most unlikely of places. It feels indebted to the Elephant 6 creative model, where albums express the vision of one artist through a whole host of close collaborators. It has a similar communal feel, like being surrounded by a group of creative friends. If this is indeed the last work of Julia Brown, it’s heartening to know that the band was able to end on such a grand statement.
