Review: Cf Watkins devastates the senses with second record, ‘Babygirl’

Four years separates her two albums ⏤ 2016’s debut I Am New and now Babygirl. Four years stretches its gnarled and ghoulish shadows across her very existence, and it’s evident in both Cf Watkins trading swampy folk music for more pristine and polished angles, and the thematic root, all knotted and tied. The Brooklyn transplant turns her gaze away from fleeting romances to those relationships that wield endurance and community: those of her dear female comrades. Babygirl, arranged with and produced by Max Hart (The War on Drugs, Katy Perry), keeps the folk foundation intact but blossoms with ornamental shimmers worthy of Sister Sparrow and Brandy Zdan.

A thick timeless syrup drips like a sugar maple’s sweet nectar; across 11 songs, Watkins bares her soul in remarkable ways. Her confessions burn and tear through the skin, her voice as sharp as a thousand knives. “I don’t want to have to try and wait for you / I don’t want to have to wait for you no more,” a haunting sting tingles her lips on the gutting “Frances,” based on the last days of her grandfather’s life. Originally from North Carolina, she has an astonishing way of rending the heart from her chest, bleeding stories and melodies until there’s nothing left to give.

Watkins plunges many more emotional rivets, steely and merciless, as deep into cold, hard earth as she possibly can. “Marie, I’ll never regret the nights I spent with you,” she weeps with the sweeping, magnetically moving “White Nights,” an absolute stunner on friendship and death. She wrings her hands over and over again, from the heart-sore “Changeable” to the sticky thumper “Babygirl,” throughout an album which emerges as musically tight as it is emotionally grueling.

The past has seared itself into her flesh, and she boldly wears those scars in the sunlight, its rays pouring golds and yellows into rich, intensely affecting melodies and vocal performances that crumble and rip you apart. Babygirl swims among crunchy jam-band waves (“Little Thing”), swirling falling stars (“The Tell”), an icky black tar glide (“Westfield”), and palpitating, brassy grooves (“New Hampshire”), feeling urgent yet plentifully languid. Cf Watkins celebrates life and all its irresistible magic, as much as she does death’s brutal, cruel hand. Babygirl is the kind of record that haunts your dreams, and that’s the hallmark of a masterpiece.

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