The album’s quiet hollows give rise to fever pitches of emotional intensity. With “You Will Come Home,” Margolin launches into one of the most incendiary vocal takes she’s ever captured in the studio. “Come home and take care of the mess I’ve made,” she implores of someone she addresses, in true Spencer Krug fashion, only as “Swallow.” She screams herself ragged as the song gallops to a close, her voice burning off all the varnish that once clung to its surface.
Across Clouds, Margolin wrestles with the specter of the person she would need to be to glide frictionlessly through the world: an inexhaustible performer, a calm and smiling face, a person with compact and tidy feelings that never overwhelm her or anyone else. On “God of Everything Else,” she envisions this double as a literal second person in one of the album’s most mystifying and powerful images: “Wishing I was somebody else/Begging you to love me back/I watch the way she stands/And the way her hands move/In a fog of you.” Later in the album, she sings, with barbed irony, as if she’s already transformed into this sanguine doppelganger. “Nothing makes me sad now/Everything makes me happy,” she wails on “In a Dream I’m a Painting,” sounding as if she might either start crying or spitting flames.
In the embers of all this rage smolders grief: grief for a love that tore itself apart; grief for those dreams of success whose realization did not in fact lead to a happy and balanced life; grief for all the imaginary, idealized people Margolin might have been but could not become. “The hard bits of my heart, they fall into the hole and they tear it apart,” she sings on “A Hole in the Ground.” She refuses placid resolution, refuses to fold her pain neatly away. Hers is a world-making torment: It shatters the real and demands its wayward shards forge themselves into formerly unimaginable shapes.
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