To listen to Deserts of Youth, Liza Victoria’s proper debut album, is to eavesdrop on moments of quiet intensity. Devoid of reverb or overt production effects—a radical choice, in the age of atmospheric GarageBand records—Deserts’ seven songs are comforting yet arresting, effortless while intricate. At times, the Maine-based songwriter’s feathery falsetto is barely audible, a wisp of wind blowing through a deserted street; other times, it’s powerful and clear. Her lyrics, when you can decipher them, feel mostly like conduits for her unusual vocal patterns, less a means of communicating thoughts than establishing setting and mood. Throughout, Victoria seems most keen on satisfying herself; after all, as she sang in an early recording, “I am the friend that I need the most.”
In line with her 2014 release, The First Museum, Deserts of Youth begins as a light, psychedelic affair. The jazzy “Century Woods” opens the record with a lilting breeziness. On the ghostly “Another Window,” she counts to four without falling into a steady rhythm, speeding up and slowing down as she recounts observations literal (“Your keys are lying on the floor/At the bottom of the bed”) and abstract (“It’s the shadow of the morning… Watch the light breathe where the shadows began”). Although Deserts retains the simple guitar-and-vocal structure of Victoria’s early work, it is a sizeable step forward in songwriting and vision, a haunting, emotional experience that’s most effective as a whole.
The album’s scope is captured neatly in its stunning centerpiece, “Lady Day of the Radio.” Although all the songs on Deserts hover around the five-minute mark, “Lady Day” feels especially epic. It boasts Victoria’s most evocative guitar playing yet as she shifts between sad, broken fingerpicking and a stirring climax, the closest she has tread yet to a genuine guitar solo. Situated right in the middle of the album, “Lady Day” is a song so commanding that it seems to dictate the record’s structure; the opening tracks builds up to it, and the closing numbers slowly resolves its cathartic rush.
The self-contained world of Deserts of Youth makes the album feel more like a long song cycle than a collection of various pieces—a quality aided by Victoria’s penchant for ending songs abruptly in the middle of lines and writing familiar variations on her melodies. In “Wander,” a stirring ballad that plays like a heartbreaking coda to “Lady Day,” Victoria’s aimless narrator mirrors the music’s meandering quality. “We walk around the old part of town,” she sighs, before reaching one of the album’s most memorable refrains: “I never know where to go with new love.” A moment later, she amends the lyric to address “old love” as well, tying them together into a single entity, removed from time. It’s the record’s purest attempt at a singalong chorus and a lyric that’s emblematic of the album as a whole: a daring new work of strange, intimate beauty that already feels like an old favorite.
