All Around Us gets its name from a children’s book. It's an appropriate inspiration given the plainspoken way Briana Marela talks about emotions. "It’s cool to care! Chill is boring," she recently tweeted, and she means it; she titled her 2012 album Speak from Your Heart.
Marela recorded All Around Us, her first for Jagjaguwar, in Reykjavík with Sigur Rós producer Alex Somers. Strings are played by Amiina, another name that shows up frequently in Sigur Rós album credits. Not surprisingly, some of this record’s instrumental sections—particularly the intros of "Dani", "Surrender", and "Further"—feel like place settings for a soaring Jónsi vocal. Instead, Marela enters with crystalline sweetness, not unlike Chvrches’ Lauren Mayberry, but breathier, more deliberate, and precise. Just as she does in her intimate live performances, Marela loops and layers pitched exhalations (usually "oh" or "ah-oh") to create choral collages that could just as easily evoke Iceland or her Pacific Northwest homeland. It’s her best, most affecting asset.
Her emotional forthrightness can be refreshing, too. On "Friend Tonight", she forces herself out of the house and pleads for an old flame to help her face the darkness, but only in a platonic way. "Don’t come back to my bed tonight/ I just need a friend tonight," she repeats. Just as often, though, her only mildly poetic candor disrupts the songs. Marela’s lyrics sometimes lack craft and thoughtfulness, like words plucked from a diary and dropped into a song without regard to word choice or rhythm. It’s a fine line between childlike and childish, and too many songs tend toward the latter. On "Take Care of Me", a bouncy tale of a relationship going right, a line like "Now you know me so well, it’s special that I can be myself" stands out not for its honesty but its jarring "Sesame Street" tone.
"I Don’t Belong to You" suffers from the same clunkiness: "Dream of all the possibilities/ We can do anything/ It’s not a competition/ Everyone has music within them." And "Follow It" is meant to be similarly inspirational, but even amid the gorgeous waves of Marela’s vocals and the well-placed, unpredictable percussion, the words sound like the platitudes of an out-of-work motivational speaker.
She's at her best when she’s lyrically and instrumentally ethereal. "Everything Is New" reworks a song from an earlier live album, and Marela wisely lets it breathe and slowly build, accompanying only with subtle drones at first. "What matters when everything is new?" she asks. It’s a worthwhile question, and she uses it to get at the concept of carpe diem. "All we have is now," she says. "All we have is here, and I don’t have the time/ Want to keep you always near, but I don’t have the time." That is honest simplicity. Sometimes—perhaps most often—relationships end not with fits of rage and screaming and crying. They end for multiple mundane reasons. Two people are right in front of each other, yet they don’t have time to figure it out. Life gets in the way. As Marela sings on the title track, "Time is love, and love is the time it takes to know someone so well." Love takes time, and that takes work—that’s the stuff that belongs in both children’s books and Marela’s music.
