Listening to an Asher White record, you get the sense that she approaches songwriting like an interior designer. She treats her songs like rooms she can move throughout, rearranging their furniture—pushing the couch from one corner to another, angling a chair ever so slightly in a different direction. “The sink thank you,” which opens her latest album, 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living, comes together like move-in day, starting as an empty room with nothing but some muffled, tentative strings before other additions begin to fill the space: slot machine sound effects, snare drums, faraway chimes, a thumping bassline, keys that sound straight out of Fiona Apple’s “Valentine,” a smattering of handclaps; until finally, White’s delicate voice creeps in. At times, each instrument sounds like it belongs in a different song; sometimes there’s a TV in the bathroom, a bed in the hallway, a bathtub in the kitchen. Yet somehow, they all make sense under the same roof.
White has a talent for melding elements that ought to sound out of place together, instead making them seem right at home. On average, she has released more than an album a year for the past decade, her work evolving from sound collages of field recordings to maximalist post-rock and chamber pop with electronic and orchestral elements. On 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living, she channels her dynamic soundscaping into an examination of interdependence, strained relationship dynamics, and labors of love.
An unnamed love interest reappears throughout these songs, acting as a foil to White’s narrators as she explores gendered divides and public vs. private life. At the tremulous conclusion of “The sink thank you,” she offers remarks to a partner that are as glowing as they are pointed: “Did you clean the sink?/Thank you/I can’t stand to love you all like this/And when I have a child/I will raise her to wake early like you.” The narrator’s shortcomings are reflected back to her in the idealized traits of her lover, kicking off an album-length series of domestic misadventures both tragic and mundane.
On “Beers with my name on them,” White plays the housewife whose quiet dissatisfaction stirs underneath her placid demeanor. “There’s a surprise waiting in the foyer/The fall of another personal empire today/I do the dishes/I do not shave my legs/And I wait for you to come home,” she sings in an angelic voice with Betty Draper-like repression, all while surrounded by tinfoily guitar feedback and a drumbeat that mimics the pummel of a washing machine on its highest spin setting. “Cobalt Room: Good Work / Silver Saab,” the record’s seven-and-a-half-minute centerpiece, recalls the noisier, jam-based work of White’s tourmates Deerhoof and Black Country, New Road. Then its industrial post-rock shatters into a jazzy breakdown while White’s narrator yearns for domestic favors and physical affection: “Cobalt color, ugly room/Won’t you paint it white for me?/Husband, if you come back soon/Won’t you kiss me tenderly?”
These songs hold history like family heirlooms, revealing how inherited trauma persists in both momentary interpersonal interactions and generational disasters—like on “Travel safe,” which draws connections between White’s Ukrainian Jewish ancestors seeking uncertain refuge in the United States and the people of Gaza who continue to be victims of manufactured famine, statelessness, and genocide. The track’s wandering ambient instrumental reflects just how unstable the concept of home can be.
White floats deftly between post-rock sprawl, electronic experimentalism, and percussive folk. Like her forebears Sufjan Stevens and Fiona Apple, she’s adept at dropping pop melodies into unexpected places and abandoning them at a moments’ notice for messier or more atonal sounds. The record’s most beautiful moments are also its most disconcerting: “Country Girls,” a track inspired by Clarice Lispector and Eve Babitz whose ghostly baroque-pop hoedown sounds as though it’s on the verge of falling apart under the clatter of worn-down dancing shoes; or “Like another planet Instrumental,” a twinkly soundscape that plays out like a dream ballet, growing more cacophonous over its two-minute runtime until it abruptly ends. On 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living, no illusion goes unshattered; nothing on the record is allowed to sound too pretty without getting a bit fucked up. There is always more to the picture-perfect home than meets the eye.
