by Karina Teichert (@i.d.kt)
Coraline (2009) is filled with all kinds of other-worldly magic: dolls that spy on their owners, bugs that double as couches, and British women with good teeth. It’s easy to get lost in the fantasy of this movie, but what most people forget is the quiet majesty of the garden scene, where Bruno Coulais’ twangy, almost harp-like bassline paints an aural picture of flowers blooming and insects pollinating. It’s this scene that played in my mind’s eye as soon as I began listening to Julia Holter’s sixth full-length studio album, Something in the Room She Moves.
The album is a masterclass in texture, creating dynamic, ever-flowing tracks that range from meandering, ambient art pop to compositional jazz to good old-fashioned noise. Each song is alternately lush and stripped back without compromising on richness or depth. “Sun Girl” is a veritable rainforest of sound, with soaring backing vocals and a bassline that sounds like tree frogs jumping from leaf to leaf. This track is the most baroque pop-ish, and one of the least traditionally “experimental,” but don’t let that fool you. As you travel through the nearly six minute runtime, Holter takes you on a journey from dawn to dusk. The first half of the song is teeming with life, anchoring listeners in the daytime. After a brief noisy, pagan breakdown, the song continues into the gentle, yet still vibrant, echo of night.
“Materia”’s minimalism stands in stark contrast to the verdant landscape of “Sun Girl.” Its stripped down, singular vocal track and tender piano accompaniment are reminiscent of an acoustic Laurie Anderson. Holter’s approach to singing is heavily jazz-inspired, using the voice as an instrument rather than solely a vehicle for lyrics. But make no mistake, her lyrics are absolutely still of note. Throughout the album, she sings in cryptic and agrammatical sentence fragments and, occasionally, nonsensical words, like an ee cummings poem come to life. In the case of “Meyou,” she employs distortion trickery to blend the two words into one, urging the audience to consider how closely entwined their identity is with the people around them. After all, who are we if not each other? Holter poses similarly abstract questions in “Spinning,” a grinding, almost mechanical track that asks the audience “What is delicious?/And what is omniscient?/And what is the circular magic I'm visiting?” What is delicious indeed.
Something in the Room She Moves cares too much, is hungry for art and for answers, and, more than anything, is constantly growing, shifting, moving, grieving. It’s a leopard on the prowl, the gazelle it’s hunting for, and the grass that undulates softly beneath both of them. It is a beating, bleeding heart: so full of color and life that everything else has withered in comparison. Proceed with caution.