Sorrowful lyrics against spirited playing create a magical crux on the experimental singer-songwriter’s latest, a powerfully maternal and spiritually yearning collection of dark folk music.
There’s plenty of darkness on Larkin Grimm’s Chasing an Illusion, but more than ever, she leans toward the light. On her first release since 2012’s Soul Retrieval, the experimental singer-songwriter deepens the drones and trances she’s toyed with over her decade-plus career. Grimm frees herself to more fully embrace her spiritual yearning, all while tempering the transcendental edges of her obsidian music with the acknowledgment that joy and tranquility, while worth pursuing, can be fleeting and complicated when sharing your reality with other flawed human beings.
Joined by a full cast of musicians that includes longtime David Bowie producer Tony Visconti on bass, Grimm softens the qualities that used to get her music filed squarely under freak-folk. There’s less surface quirk, fewer references to nature, and more lush and expansive instrumentation. Even her voice sounds different: more open, more relaxed. Instead of the sharp curls that embroidered albums like 2007’s The Last Tree or 2009’s Parplar, she issues long, breathy syllables, often multitracking her vocals and scattering her presence across the album’s field of sound. On the lovely, droning “Fear Transforms into Love (Journey in Turiyasangitananda),” she pronounces the word “physically” as Björk might, savoring every percussive consonant. Between ruptures of harpsichord, she sings as if from across a quarry, eager to be heard from a wide, damp distance.
Though much of Grimm’s back catalog comprises love songs—beautiful, terrifying love songs that explore the carnal aspects of human desire—Chasing an Illusion addresses a kind of love heard less often in pop music. She sings from her position as a mother, full of hope and fear for her child. “The hardest thing I’ve done in my life/Is just keeping you alive,” she sings on “Keeping You Alive.” “You throw your body into ocean waves/Expecting them to catch you like I would/I can’t always break your fall/Sometimes I can’t be there at all.” It’s a stirring note of apology as she laments her inability to be the whole world to the person she loves most. On “A Perfect World,” she imagines just that for her child, an accepting paradise “where you can be happy and free.” Again, the song feels ringed with apology: We’re not in that perfect world, and teaching a child to survive a violent one ranks among the more painful challenges of parenthood.
On multiple tracks, Grimm overlays her lyrical content onto tonally contradictory accompaniment. “I Don’t Believe,” written as a love song to abuse survivors, counts among the album’s most soothing tracks. Grimm repeats the title over and over like a mantra or a lullaby, lulling herself into a trance even as she’s wishing death upon both herself and her tormentor. Later, the album’s free-form closing title track sees Grimm howling the stanza, “My heart is empty/My soul is empty too/I feel dead inside/Don’t you?” Behind her, her band breaks into one of the most upbeat sequences on the whole album, like they’ve finally found their groove and started to cut loose. Grimm’s vocals turn wordless, and she lets collaborator Margaret Morris have the final spoken word: “And how do we go about forgiving?”
These paradoxical moments of sorrowful lyrics against spirited playing make up the crux of the magic Grimm weaves on Chasing an Illusion. Pain can be paralyzing, but it can also level the ground for something new to grow. Pain and the healing that follows it can turn us loose. In Grimm’s world, the most important thing a person can be is free.
