by Sean Fennell (@seanrfennell)
Late last month, Lomelda broke through the noise. If you’ve heard the noise, the deafening shriek of the very online, you know that’s not easy. “Hannah Sun'' did just that, sending a spark down the spine of a niche’s niche, slicing through another Thursday in this, at least a bottom five timeline. Tweets like this and this and this don’t accompany your run of the mill single, they are a harbinger of a moment, if a small one. It makes sense, “Hannah Sun'' is an incredible song, somehow both lush and sparse, it’s a deceptively simple tune with otherworldly synths spotting the canvas like Hal from Malcolm In The Middle (or Jackson Pollock if you prefer). The whole of Lomelda’s new record, Hannah, is not all so immediately inviting, some even preferring to keep you at a distance, but, like “Hannah Sun',' it all feels so naturalistic, so full of fluid spontaneous contradictions, that you become a willing victim the to push and pull.
In the moments when Hannah reaches for the edges of its palette it's hard not to see the similarly experimental artist Alex G as an inspiration. “Both Mode,” with its flayed beats, harsh, dissonant single chord rumblings and frantically determined strumming, would fit snugly on DSU or Trick. Even songs like “It’s Lomelda” and “Wonder,” though far less actively challenging than “Both Mode” and leaner and more vulnerable than much of Alex G’s work, share a similar approach, one that finds moments of melodic payoff just out of reach, full of starts and stops that leave you with a slippery, elusive grasp.
It’s not fair to bring these Alex G comparisons much further though. Never has he released anything with the emotional range and sheer unvarnished vulnerability as Hannah. Sure, there are production quirks, layered, expert musicianship, and even some playful asides, but this is a record of feeling as much as performance. Look no further than the “Hannah” triptych that weaves throughout the album, beginning with the aforementioned “Hannah Sun” and continuing with “Hannah Happiest” and “Hannah Please”.
The obvious narrative is well, obvious. Lomelda is Hannah Read and this is Hannah asserting herself beyond the pseudonymous character she has created, but it’s not that simple. If anything, this trio is less revelatory than anything else on the record, instead wrapping everything in a gauze of uncertainty. There’s plenty of specifics in “Hannah Sun,” city and state names populate the song like a tour itinerary, but, like the stagnant delirium of a Tuesday night on the second month of that very tour, these are specifics without context. It’s no surprise it leads us into “Hannah Happiest,” a song that sandwiches a therapy session's worth of questions between the deceptively devastating line, “Are you the happiest you’ve been?” and the somehow even more devastating refrain, “Asked you if you knew who I was”. To complete the trilogy we throw all specifics out the window. Time and place are irrelevant, all we’re left with is a few lines, the bleak hum of a Songs: Ohia song, and the grim feeling that something, somewhere, sometime went wrong. Read is not interested in diaristic revelations, even as she embraces Hannah over Lomelda. Many of the best records find a way to show rather than tell, but Hannah finds a way to feel without explanation and in turn, pass that feeling onto us, in all its disjointed, nonsensical, and wonderful complexities, and that’s about as revelatory as you can get.