My Light, My Destroyer

There is a careful balance between wry insight and open-heartedness in Cassandra Jenkins's songs. As on her very well-received 2021 album, An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, on My Light, My Destroyer, Jenkins casts an editor's eye on her daily observances and interactions, reporting back from Illinois hotel rooms and the farthest regions of the cosmos.It is outer space that supplies a canopy for much of My Light, My Destroyer, whether in the field recorded stargazing session with her mother that opens "Betelgeuse," or in "Aurora, IL," the recounting of William Shatner's sad epiphany about the Earth's fragility and the colour blue that he brought back home with him from aboard Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin space shuttle. Jenkins boldly goes in search of metaphors where vastness and awe threaten to pull them apart.Musically, Jenkins tries on a few different guises here. On tracks like "Clams Casino" and "Petco" she plugs her guitar into the gravel that recalls artists like Sharon Van Etten or occasional tour mate Courtney Barnett. But Jenkins isn't the kind of big vocal belter that these country road anthems usually house, so she pushes her whisper right up to the mic to accommodate her storytelling. Elsewhere, such as on standout track "Delphinium Blue," she selects loose elastic bass lines and neon synthesizers to balance the daily task of managing a flower shop against the swooning romantic triggers that dwell all around her.She brings her romance and astronomy together on "Omakase," repeating the album title in a consideration of a terrible beauty that threatens destruction; "my lover, my meteorite." The song's title comes from a Japanese phrase that refers to trust, usually in a culinary setting, and it unlocks the central tension of the album's inward and outward searching for answers arriving within a trail of falling star strings. The haze of perplexity plays out through the end, though things tip ever-so-slightly into a cocktail party full of light jazzy soft rock asides rather than the first half's silvery claw, hidden in a velvet glove.Taken as a whole, My Light, My Destroyer opens an interrogation of subtle differences between guise and disguise. As Jenkins is casting around for meanings hidden in both the far flung cosmos and micro momentary, so does she adopt various musical mantles. Her experiments with cross-stitching sometimes unravel, but even the loose ends make for powerful listens.