Alena Spanger prefers non-verbal communication. On her new album, Fire Escape, she is partial to birdsong, wind that chimes like Erik Satie, and the sound of rain hitting the roof at dawn. In Tiny Hazard, the experimental pop group she formed with college classmates, she whispered, giggled, gasped, and howled over feverish guitars and jagged basslines. Her elastic vocals, which evoke the kineticism of Björk on “It’s Oh So Quiet” and Karin Dreijer on “Heartbeats,” are often most powerful as wordless interjections—a sudden “ha!” mid-verse or a maniacal cackle at the end of a chorus. On Fire Escape, her solo debut, Spanger and a collective of fellow Brooklyn musicians construct a dreamlike atmosphere of wind instruments, harps, and synths around her operatic range.
When she does reach for words, Spanger takes inspiration from nature’s fury and splendor, rather than more muted human emotions. On the twinkling “Ines,” she’s not just paralyzed by apprehension—she is both underwater and on fire. On the slow-moving “Agios,” “a man’s pain” isn’t simply destructive—it “hollers down the mountain, with the grace of a giant.” Her loved ones are like “starfish,” and the ocean is as much an existential threat (“Fire Escape”) as a source of absolution (“Satie Song”). Spanger refers to herself in self-deprecating terms—“a fickle girl,” a “sly wicked child”—but withholds details, gesturing at seesaws and lavender fields as shorthands for shortcomings. She shades in the vagueness with sharp inhales, speechless stutters, and single syllables repeated like mantras. It is, as she sings on “All That I Wanted,” “illegible and whole,” her words more deeply felt as they shapeshift and disconnect from meaning.
Fire Escape covers a surprising amount of ground in just over 40 minutes—the slightly askew dance pop of “Sinking Like,” the impressionistic, ambient textures of “Fire Escape” and “My Feel,” the jittery rock of “Ines.” With Spanger’s voice at the center, discordant transitions, like “All That I Wanted” leading into the lullabye-esque, aptly named “Go to Sleep,” feel part of a whole, connected by synth pads and the slight rasp at the corners of her range. The surrounding instrumentation expands and contracts to fit Spanger’s many modes: the gentle rumble of Carmen Quill’s upright bass and Kalia Vandever’s trombone on “My Feel” echo the elegiac solitude in her voice; the harp on “Ines,” played by Kitba’s Rebecca El-Saleh, matches the fantastical elements in its lyrics. But often her voice needs very little additional accompaniment—like former tourmate Adrianne Lenker, Spanger is most evocative at her quietest: When she dips into a low, hushed tone on “Methuen,” the world around her grows silent to accommodate.
At the intimate Brooklyn venue The Owl in January, the crowd was laughing with Spanger, even if she wasn’t trying to be funny. Sitting at the keyboard, she sang the opening line of “Difficult People”—“You tricked me with your flickering eyes”—and the subsequent reveal—“I didn’t realize those were your everyday eyes”—landed like a punchline. Many of Spanger’s songs twist like this: an unexpected metaphor, an indecipherable vocal sample, a joke where one might expect a confession. For an album that might at first seem minimalistic—indeed, it resonates just as strongly performed on solo piano—Fire Escape is jammed full with whistles, animal calls, pitched hums, and crackling roars. It’s a remarkable debut that is both patient and restless, whimsical and wise, conveying whole worlds without saying a word.
