Review: Lauren Calve documents personal growth on ‘Shift’
The singer-songwriter’s debut LP is not to be missed.
Life’s about change, and nothing ever stays the same. As human beings, we’re creatures of habit, so undergoing change can be a tough pill to swallow. We flounder and fight against the rising tides with the hope of warding off whatever cosmic shift is taking place. With her new record, appropriately called Shift, Lauren Calve documents her journey, giving into the elements as she soldiers ahead into the eye of a storm. Her life, it seems, has wrought spotty weather and brutally ever-changing seasons. 10 songs hollow out her heart, leaving her to refill her cup with new-found wisdom about what it means to live.
“I’m the painter of my fate,” she sings in the heart-rending “When I’m Gone,” a smoldering ballad with pitter-patter percussion. Calve sews her voice into the song’s fabric, as she often does, and it’s within the fluttering pastel layers that the emotion really washes over you. Her view on life expands and contracts as though guided by each breath she takes. With the cataclysmic shift in her perspective, as evidenced with such cuts as the title track and “Subtle Alchemy,” her musical genius rises to the surface. “Ring Them Bells” clatters and bangs, a dark and stormy entry that finds Calve dishing up an exquisitely somber performance. “I don’t think of you as often as I should,” she sings, her voice ringing through a din of guitars and drums.
Where “Everything at the Same Time,” the self-described “guiding light” of the album, rumbles with indie-rock venom, “See You Again” vaporizes in puffs of purple smoke – among Calve’s most evocative moments. Closing the album, “Deep in the Hollow” strikes a similar musical chord, complete with a rainstick poking through the haze. Calve is never confined to genre, although she does paint with a particular palette of Americana, blues, and rock. Each color waxes bright and brilliant. Her brush strokes magnificently light up the canvas, with a voice etching in the details of her stories.
Shift is quite a statement piece. A manifesto scrawled in pain, loss, and redemption. The shifts inside of her seem to burst and fizz onto the record. “Will it take me or break me under its weight? Or will I take it and break away?” she asks on the opener and titular cut. Calve weaves these questions into the music, often finding the answers or letting the words hang precariously in the air for another time and place. Sometimes, life doesn’t give you what you seek, but you must let it happen to you anyway. Shift is that expedition into and through the passing of time and its lingering effects on the body and mind. Lauren Calve is merely a vessel – and her work emerges as the work of a masterclass.
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