Time comes for us all in ways both banal (your Warped Tour tee is worth $300 on Grailed) and cataclysmic (someone you love dies). On Distant Lands, their fourth solo record, zzzahara, aka Los Angeles’ Zahara Jaime, stares backwards at the past’s foggy contours, whether it was last night’s nightmare or the vicissitudes of childhood. Through a slurry of distorted guitars and deadpan singing, the album brushes against grief, addiction, and abandonment through a layer of gauzy nonchalance.
Sunny like an overexposed photograph, dysthymic like the “before” half of a Zoloft commercial, the record’s gentle shoegaze would sound just as at home on a pair of blown-out desktop speakers as a giant pair of subwoofers. Between a Korg CR4 cassette recorder, a $10 Goodwill synth, and Casey Lagos’ crystalline pop production (he’s previously worked with Kesha and Cold War Kids), the record alternately evokes Cocteau Twins and Sky Ferreira, My Bloody Valentine and Best Coast.
As influences on this album, zzzahara cites artistic titans of emotion—poet Mary Oliver and director Wong Kar Wai. Distant Lands approaches such feelings sidelong, as if acting casual will soften grief’s blow. Without an album bio, no one would know “My Little Dove” is dedicated to the bird that visited Jaime’s house after their brother died when they were 12; you might equally miss the reference to family addiction they slip into “Chinese Tobacco,” singing, “Dancing with the chemistry of a man who drinks in his room.” The peppy “Speedracer” exemplifies what zzzahara does best: a blast of agile guitar fuzz and echoey vocals that mask the terror of vulnerability. “Smoking a blunt/Nothing can touch me,” they aver before the chorus blows their cover: “Please don’t let me down.”
zzzahara’s approach to these ghosts is oblique, and it can be difficult to see their outlines underneath the abstraction. The best art about heartbreak lets us in close enough to discover certain emotional and environmental specifics—it wouldn’t be In the Mood for Love without the steam rising off the pavement. Distant Lands tries to marry sunbleached fuzz with existential rumination, but its most compelling performances lie in Jaime’s guitar parts, particularly on a song like “She Doesn’t Want Me to Exist.” Pining guitar saws through the melody like a serrated knife, breaking into a flurry of distortion and noise before finally settling back to its polite initial form. In that moment, the pain feels immediate, and then the urgency dissipates like a passing storm.
