Loud City Song
Julia Holter
44:42 min • Domino • August 19, 2013
John Preston reviews
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Julia Holter is still an experimental artist but this, her third album, puts her voice in a clear spotlight. The fog of last year’s outstanding Eklastis has almost completely cleared, and been replaced with a brightness, and a more straightforward mood taking its place. With Holter, straightforward equals a concept of sorts that references Gigi the book, film and musical, which starred Audrey Hepburn in the title role, and also contemporary celebrity culture. It’s interesting that Loud City Song, her most accessible album to date, shares themes that have already been appropriated by pop queens Madonna and Lady Gaga, but rest assured neither generation of pop icon is likely to make an album that sounds anything like Loud City Song.
An angelic a capella cry of “Heaven” is the first thing heard on ‘World’, which slowly introduces piano and then strings, with lyrics about hiding behind the brim of your hat in a city that’s too interested in you. She wants to live in a city, in her apartment block on the fifth floor, but is exhausted and bored by the intense scrutiny of strangers. Like many of the songs here, Holter starts off quiet and pure but becomes increasingly crowded and tense as things progress. Like the climate in her native LA, occasional volatile moods can disrupt the calm but the release is restorative.
Maxim’s was the restaurant favoured by judgemental Parisian society featured in Gigi and there are 2 variations of a song named after it here that form the foundations on which the remaining material sits. ‘Maxim’s I’ is played in slow motion, dreamy and not fully conscious, it toughens up for a piano and violin-pricked middle eight and then dissolves again. Later on in the album ‘Maxim’s II’ is experiencing the restaurant when it’s reservations only, noisy and overly stimulating with snatches of isolated senseless conversations.
Tonight the birds are watching me,
Do they have more important things to do?
It has a big beat and is sung-spoken by Holter in a way that is reminiscent, as is the whole track, of art-pop Grande Dame Laurie Anderson during her most commercially successful, early eighties period.
‘Horns Surrounding’ starts with a recording of a man running and breathing heavily, being chased by what can be presumed to be the paparazzi. It doesn’t disappoint with its horns pay off. It is sonically grand and classical in a traditional sense. ‘Hello Stranger’ is a cover of the Barbra Lewis R ‘n’ B classic from the early sixties and Holter treats it as an ironic David Lynch Julie Cruise standard. Suspended keyboards and haunted vocals leading to eventual confusion and distress which is continued through to the plaintive, Angelo Badalamenti-like piano ballad ‘He’s Running Through My Eyes’. The throbbing double bass and dead panned repetition of the line, “there’s a flavour to the sound of walking no one ever noticed before,” of ‘In the Green Wild’ is all quirk and twitch in the best possible sense.
Loud City Song is certainly Julia Holter’s most musical album to date and is structured in a way that, more than anything, is typical of a musical play, much like its references. It is simultaneously very old fashioned in its use of instruments and arrangements and modern in the way it stops short of any clear categorisation. The song-writing itself is maybe less evolved than Eklastis, nothing quite matches that album’s ‘In The Same Room’ for simplicity and immediacy, but its strengths lay elsewhere. As an artist Holter and her LA based work keeps moving forward at a tireless, restless place and on Loud City Song she had made something that is intimate, warm and more than ever before, relatable.
