Review: Brandy Zdan studies love & self-worth with sophomore album, ‘Secretear’

The heart’s decaying plunder has long been integral to falling apart, rising above and living to write about it. Ask any songwriter, and they’re likely to entertain that notion with their own stories of hardship and misery. From Hank Williams’ weepy “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” to the spitting venom of Alanis Morissette‘s “You Oughta Know” to Miranda Lambert‘s utterly-paralyzing confessions to the “Tin Man,” matters of the heart are forever imprinted on country and rock music, especially in processing trauma through art and highlighting personal growth. Rocker Brandy Zdan (formerly of The Trishas) keeps her heart close to the chest with her sophomore record, Secretear, a Spanish word which roughly translates to “whisper” or “to talk secretively,” hammering home the album’s general beat, drawing lines between intimate relationships that have gone down in flames and her own enlightened self-love. “Cold and knocked out on the floor / The fears are always at my door / All that I hide kept me up in the night,” she sings on “Secret Tears,” bruised and caked over with fractured electric guitar. She wields her voice in splintered reverence, a stormy quiet branded in a furiously dire mental state.

Her capacity to exhume the darkest and dustiest emotions out of the listener’s cobwebbed subconscious is the central tie-in, a mighty, unbreakable thread sewing each stained and tattered piece together. Secretear, produced by Zdan, along with Teddy Morgan (John Oates), is as bedeviling as a lion in wait, arresting and brutish. Zdan navigates each throbbing vessel of the heart with delicacy and precision. “You’re always looking to begin again / Are you the night rider / Are you the truth teller,” she presses with the smooth-gulp of “Night Rider,” painting a vivid escapist scene right at dusk, as the sun crests the earth, splashing hues of pinks, reds and golden yellows across the usual blue. It’s splendid and apt to wreck your heart even further, behind recognition and understanding. “On the dusty flatlands, there’s a wind that could take you for miles, take you for miles / Take you for miles, and you could just disappear.”

“Navigator” analyzes the frailty of the human form and augmentation of pain, sequestered and enlarged in our own heads (“The loneliness is amplified / The unkindness it shows / It always ends up the same for me / I come down hard and can barely see,” she accepts, a mixture of luminous guitars, bass and drums dancing in candlelight). “Run Away” is a dazzling bender, jingling along, a frenzied warning to a potential lover to get out of dodge and avoid an inevitable disaster. Jumping timelines, from the distant past to the short-lived present, the record is “kind of a non-typical love song album,” she describes. With funk-garage opener “Get to You,” a staggering infatuation-soaked burn, Zdan’s gaze penetrates the smoke of a dive bar on a neon-cut Friday night. She’s both reckless and authoritative in her desires. “The Ones” is among many nods to Blondie and The Cars, a severe reprimand on choices coming back to bite you in the ass. “Careful what, what you choose / It can creep up and abuse you / Words are said then taken back / I’m smiling in that photograph,” she warns. Crisp and burnt guitar, a characteristic of much of the playing on the record, thanks to switch ups between Zdan, Morgan and Carl Broemel, shakes and rattles like rolling thunder. Zdan’s voice flashes in fluorescent shards of a lightning rod, unexpected and instinctive. My Morning Jacket player Tom Blankenship lends his bass to the proceedings, often feeling ghostly, brittle and exhilarating in each full swoop.

Where “I Want Your Trouble,” inspired by a text message during her courtship with husband, drummer and co-writer Aaron Haynes, punches you in the throat, “I Will” trots along as a Clydesdale chomps at the bit, almost in waltz-like twilight. “There’s a lot of messages and reminders within the songs to myself. It’s an album about love and self-love and generally just coming to terms with who you are,” Zdan vouches of the album’s themes, which are dislodged from sinewy membranes and strike in profound heaviness. Secretear is anything but a whisper. It roars. It clashes, and start to finish, it wraps its veiny tentacles around your heart and never lets go. Like ever.

Grade: 3.5 out of 5

Follow Zdan on her socials: Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Website