Alexandra Drewchin has roughly 100 different voices, and she employs all of them to chilling effect on RIP Chrysalis, her second record as Eartheater. There’s the high, weeping one that turns up at the beginning of the icy psyh-Appalachia ballad "Petal Head"; there’s the bamboo-brittle alto that crackles menacingly at the center of the rippling "Wetware". And then there are all the others, rendered almost inhuman with digital effects: baritone-low and groaning, solemn and choir-like, chattering and mechanized. She layers them several at a time, so that it often seems like she’s in conversation with herself: two Drewchins—one way up high, one way down low—share the melody on"“Humyn Hymn", making lyrics like, "Chemical computer syringe/ Memories are fading away/ Rolling off the side of the bed," seem like they’re written in code that only the two singers understand.
It’s a fitting approach for a record which, as its title implies, deals with personal transformation; later in "Hymn", Drewchin sings, "The more I look back, the more I want to look ahead," and she spends the bulk of the album deep-diving into herself, delivering haunting descriptions of the shapes and spirits she encounters along the way. Arriving just eight months after the first Eartheater record, Metalepsis, Chrysalis displays a startling new firmness and depth to Drewchin’s songwriting. Where her first record felt more deliberately synthetic, making ample use of synthesizers and electronics, on Chrysalis, Drewchin operates from a base of American folk music. Dry-board banjos and plucked acoustic guitars form the foundation of most of the songs, leaving plenty of room through which Drewchin winds her snaking voice. There are still plenty of synths, but on Chrysalis, they augment rather than dominate. It’s as if Drewchin had raided The Anthology of American Folk Music but only absorbed the songs about ghosts. The closest recent comparison would be Cat Power’s Moon Pix, but Drewchin’s songs are more expansive and more free-form, showing hints of her time spent in the psych outfit Guardian Alien. One of the reasons Chrysalis is so fascinating and absorbing is because Drewchin obliterates the notion of song structure, starting from something as time-honored as folk, but bashing down the walls and ceiling around it to create music that feels mystical and searching.
As much as it’s about personal change, Chrysalis also seems to be about discovering new ways of songwriting, one that leaves the borders porous and the time elastic. A fiddle corkscrews at the opening of the title track before Drewchin’s banjo takes over; eventually, the background is filled with the sound of a ringing telephone and a fog of electronics, a bleary canvas of sound that Drewchin’s ethereal alto gradually floats across. She recites the lyrics of the creeping "Wetware"—"Deprogramming false fundamental makeup"—as if she’s casting a spell, while synths pulse like an android heartbeat behind her. And she begins "Mask Therapy" by repeating the words "identity crisis" over rippling, mirage-like guitar, a rhythm track that sounds like a failing air compressor thudding beneath. Songs enter and fade at their own pace, like clouds ribboning out across the sky at dusk.
The album’s title can be read two ways—the tearing of the chrysalis that allows new life, and the death of the same once that new life has begun. On "Ecdysisyphus", she flatly declares, "There’s a first time for everything/ More like, everything is the first time." At first, it seems empty—the equivalent of a dorm room stoner’s bug-eyed command to "Think about it, man." But after hearing the record that follows, it feels like a profound personal declaration. RIP Chrysalis is the sound of someone figuring themselves out in real time, making all of their distinct voices harmonize, and creating new musical forms to share their discoveries.
