Holly Macve’s second album is like the bobbly touch of your favorite sweater when you're feeling down: warm, comforting and organically familiar, a sensation of melancholic succor that bypasses logic for emotional instinct. There is nothing particularly new about Not the Girl, the new album from the Brighton, England-based singer; its influences—Bobbie Gentry, Carole King and Mazzy Star—are comfortingly well worn. But Macve wields familiar tools with compassion and a deft musical touch, crafting an album that calls back to the golden Valium bubble of late ’60s/early ’70s pop in the lineage of Tapestry, Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman” or sad Abba. Its message may be impossibly glum, yet its construction is improbably comforting.
“Daddy’s Gone”, Not the Girl’s centerpiece and stand-out track, reinvigorates well-worn motifs. Its title raises the time-honored creative theme of parental abandon, and the song kicks off with the “Be My Baby” beat, a musical trope too often wheeled out as a signifier of pop grandeur. But, in an act of canny songwriting, Macve subverts expectations by establishing a message of apparent ambivalence—“I never needed him like I should have done/There was nothing to let go of, there was nothing to keep hold of”—only for the sadness to creep in quietly via a series of nagging doubts: “Everything’s fine, everything’s alright /But I just can’t help but wonder what it would have been like.” Delivered in Macve’s broody, world-weary voice, these devastating lines culminate in a teary masterpiece.
Macve’s classically-inclined songwriting and deathless voice were present on her 2017 debut, Golden Eagle, a promising album of bluegrass balladry that never quite escaped its influences. What elevates Not The Girl is its production, which adds sweeping violins, swaggering rock backbeat, noir-inflected electric guitar and the nebulous glide of a pedal steel to Macve’s already potent songs, infusing them with variety and depth. “Little Lonely Heart” and its follow-up “Sweet Marie” are not that distinct melodically (both feature solemn verses leading into swooping choruses), but their productions pull them in entirely different directions. The former is a tainted cotton-candy waltz of violins and brushed drums, while the latter is a darkly dramatic work of heavy guitars and offsetting drones.
Though her musical nostalgia is generally rewarding, there are moments on Not The Girl when Macve’s reverence for rock classicism goes a bit too far. There’s the rather obvious reference to “heaven’s door” on “Eye of the Storm,” which lies in the song’s lyrics, unchallenged, like a ponderous callback to Bob Dylan’s classic songwriting. But Macve doesn’t always take the obvious route: “Daddy’s Gone” ends with a smart left-turn; its melancholy swoon of echoing guitars and sparse piano chords mutate into a classic rock and roll chug, and the insistent piano rhythm that drives the song to climax brings to mind the Velvet Underground’s narcotic urgency.
To dislike Not The Girl for being indebted to the past is like hating summer rain for being wet. Holly Macve is a master of immaculate pop finesse, who shows exquisite control over a certain strand of musical history, with songs that go straight to the wretched heart.
