Review: Mindy Gledhill cracks open new magical dimensions with ‘Rabbit Hole’

Residing in Utah County, Utah, practicing therapist Tara Tully once dissected the turmoil raging within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, otherwise known as the Mormon Church. “We have that internal pain, and we don’t know what to do with it so we put it on our bodies. If we look good enough, if we are appealing enough, then people will like us, and people won’t be able to see what we feel like is broken inside,” she told The Guardian in a 2017 interview regarding the pressure cooker on women to adhere to strict patriarchal guidelines. It remains an institution shot through with misogyny, archaic interpretations of religious texts and an avoidance for current social developments.

Pop bedazzler Mindy Gledhill, who grew up in the church and later learned of such deceptive ways, lets her tears flow as glittering paint on porcelain cheeks. Her latest record, the wondrous and poetically-sorrowful Rabbit Hole, sketches onto tracing paper the fragility of her youth, an innocence lost to time’s growling stomach, and deftly straddles worlds, belief systems and concepts as a woman in the world. “Little one you’re on the run / Like flickering shadow in the sinking sun,” she sings, a hushed, yet urgent, reckoning to her younger self on the titular cut. She slinks into the piano’s soft gallop that soon swirls as Alice tumbling light as a feather down the metaphorical rabbit hole. Such fanciful mischief soon disentangles Gledhill’s near-lifeless limbs, and a majestic scene of lush cotton candy-capped mountaintops and babbling brooks of soda pop sweeps out from her feet. She lands with a plop in a crystal sea, and that past under which she was once buried alive is only a ghost of the past.

With “Wandering Souls,” a twisted and fluffy patch of embroidery, the storyteller reminds the dear listeners that while her trek has been a long, exhausting one, it hasn’t been for naught. “Wandering souls may appear to be lost / When in truth they are forging the trail of their most earnest thoughts,” she sings through a thin cake of tambourine, falling like sweet snow upon untouched earth. “This is no patty-cake, taffy-pull carnival ride / This is the crucible of life.” It’s an existential investigation of worlds both old and new, seeking to make sense of past traumas and the lasting damage that hangs off bones and destroys hearts. Much is the way of Rabbit Hole, from start-to-finish, and Gledhill’s touch always feels magical, but the burden’s former stranglehold has left an imprint on ever part of her being. Soul-spinning songs like “Bluebird,” in which she likens relapse to a bluebird who hasn’t quite learned its lesson yet, forever mesmerized “back into captivity,” she warbles, and the plaintive exclamation mark “Icarus” (referencing the famous figure of Greek mythology) are erected as pillars of stone and carved out of blood. “Caught like a child in a parade / You spread your arms but when you’re wounded / You can’t fly away,” she weeps in downpours, the rain washing away the pain as chalk fading on concrete.

Throughout her journey, Gledhill, whose last record was nearly six years ago, brandishes a razor-sharp, vibrant pen. She expels ever-present tragedy while exuding a burst of fractured rainbow light. “Shapes, oh society loves their shapes / Cookie cutter lives all half baked / Manufactured and sent through quality inspection,” she observes with “Lines,” one of the record’s jovially-wrought stunners. “Boo Hoo!,” dependent on her own heartbeat, flies from her lungs in much the same way, yet it’s laced with a cheeky insight to inject the record with a bit of air. She blends paint samples to evoke every possible shade of existence, circumstances and catastrophes crashing ceremoniously against one another and exploding into the stratosphere. “Water and oil as they say will not mix / But I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve / We’re like science and magic in synergy,” she sings, relinquishing her fears as a silvering sparkler struck for its brilliance on the Fourth of July. “Adiós Cariño,” which harkens to her high school days in Madrid, when her parents were missionaries, shines just as brightly, if not more-so, than the rest ⏤  “My heart was heavy as a rock / But now it’s flying free / My words were lost / But now they’re found / And all I wanna do is sing.”

Rabbit Hole, as heavy as it might be underneath, bounds in sophisticated shimmers across well-defined personal borders. The teachings embedded within the album’s hallowed walls, carved from Gledhill’s backbone-setting childhood, swell for the universe to partake. It’s a never-ending fountain of knowledge, from which we all must drinker sooner or later in order to collect our own brokenness. In the age of relentless hate-mongering against the marginalized, particularly women, people of color and LGBTQ+, the Utah pop architect gives a voice to the downtrodden. “Different names for God above / But they’re all the same to me when we worship love,” she extends an olive branch across the ominous watery depths.

She exposes her heart not only to chronicle her own transformation but as a crafty woodwork of compassion, empathy and peace in a world forever crumbling beneath our feet. Instead, we shall be truly moved and forever changed by her words, able to then step into the world as warriors to dismantle a treacherous system alongside our sister in armor. Thank you, Gledhill.

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