On her two albums with Portland dream-pop trio Blouse, Charlie Hilton sings spectral, spindly songs that bear a mortal burden. On "They Always Fly Away," from their 2011 debut, she stares gravely at a symbolic blackbird that returns over and over to the same telephone wire, and each time laments its next departure. "1000 Years," from its follow-up, is a dream of eternal life disguised as a pledge of undying love. But Hilton's morbid reveries recede without fail into the warmest and mushiest of mushy synth hooks, embracing human decay as if it were as alluring as a timeworn cassette. On Palana, her solo debut, Hilton turns her gaze to a renewable kind of death: that of our morphing identities.
Palana is the Sanskrit birth name Hilton left behind after high school, and she eulogizes it on the title track. "Palana, I always thought that you would be with me every morning," she sings in a lullaby melody, "Shifting with the wind, easily." Her tone hardens on "Something for Us All," in which "children disappear, their innocence a victim of time," so that we understand the pain, as well as the inevitability, of shedding one’s skins. "Is there anything that’s something all the time?" she wonders, with a sigh that suggests there is not.
Despite the songs’ homespun charm, there’s something faintly confrontational in Hilton’s phrasing–to precede the above line, for example, she sarcastically sings, "If happiness is something for us all/ Then go ahead and tell me what it's like." On "Funny Anyway," a lament for her lapsing memory, Hilton bemoans the social demands of small talk ("Why do they ask me what I’ve done?/ Do I have to say?"), in a way that could seem petty. Instead, you get the sense of a dormant intellect being perpetually roused into action—when the quietest person in the room suddenly speaks up, people tend to listen. Hilton's voice has a similar effect: It's pitched between Trish Keenan (or a slightly wooden impersonator) and Cat's Eyes’ Rachel Zeffira. Through the record she is elegantly detached—not disinterested so much as preoccupied, focused somewhere beyond the scope of the song.
Occasionally Palana will burst open, revealing churning undercurrents beneath Hilton’s surface calm. In the chorus of "Let's Go to a Party," she pairs a silly, splashy Europop beat with a deceptively naive mantra, sung like a curse: "I’m only happy when I’m dancing/ When I’m dancing for you." That she dances "for" and not "with" is intriguing, but true: sometimes it is easier to perform for others than honestly engage them. It’s perhaps a lonely way to be, and that melancholy floods out through the record—yet to Hilton’s characters, it feels like home. She dances alone in the company of others, and allows her many selves, simultaneously, to live.
