But this is not a mean or spiteful album. It’s an album about getting comfortable in the discomfort. On the single “Like I Say (I runaway),” Yanya sings, “The minute I’m not in control/I’m tearing up inside.” It’s a line that would make a therapist simultaneously concerned yet proud of her self-awareness. In the music video, Yanya plays a runaway bride, an image perhaps a little too on the nose. But when she loses her veil and escapes, it’s not into someone else’s arms, The Graduate-style, but into an empty field. She looks around at the trees, the sky. Nothing offers her an idea of her next move. She didn’t bail because she had a better thing going, she just knew that what was in front of her wasn’t right, and so she did something about it.
This bounding into the unknown is expressed throughout the album with light accent pieces, notably Joe Harvey-Whyte’s plaintively played pedal-steel guitar, which shows up on four tracks, and Clíona Ní Choileáin’s august cello performance, which shows up on two. Neither instrument is over- or underutilized, and neither overwhelms the songs with anything florid. When Choileáin’s instrument enters towards the end of “Mutations,” a song with a bit of an angsty constitution, it just feels like relief.
One of my favorite songs on My Method Actor is “Binding,” which may be the record’s quietest. It’s exemplary of the album’s easy strength; her voice exudes confidence. It’s a Sade-style miracle Yanya’s singing pumps out such force while hardly ever needing to rise above a whisper. Matching her vocal performance, “Binding” boils the instrumentation down to the bare bones, but nothing is lost. The song is made of not much more than a spare drum line, pedal steel, and folky strum of the guitar, while Yanya sings an impressionistic tale that is either about a car accident, getting high, or the end of a relationship. Maybe all three? She isn’t sure. In a recent interview, Yanya said of the song, “I can’t be too certain, but all the lyrics leading up to that are about someone being totally out of it, like they’ve drunk too much, or they’re on this long drive and are not really present.” She says the song’s subject is “trying to escape and get to this blissful nowhereness, of leaving their body behind.”
That sounds good, until you realize maybe it doesn’t. It’s nice to regard the soul, but on this journey to nirvana, does our earthly body not deserve some respect? Apparently not. On “Made Out of Memory,” Yanya, wispy and staccato, directly addresses this corporeal egress with some of the album’s most threatening lyrics, knife to her own throat: “I’ll dig my own grave/I don’t give a fuck.” Another venomous moment. But one done with admirable self-acceptance, however troubled. The next line: “You know I’m not ashamed to jump in.” You have to believe her.
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