Reflecting back it has been a hard year, laden with more than a typical share of triumph, tragedy, and toil. As a result I’m a little tired, although that could be slogging through two feet of snow for the last two days. Whatever the reason, I need a break and as it happens here I sit, with the day off! Huzzah.
In other news, it has come to my attention that I mistook the woman on the cover of “Entering Heaven Alive” as Jack White. Er…oops. Apologies to both Jack and the model in question.
Disc 1608 is…Premonitions
Artist: Miya Folick
Year of Release: 2018
What’s up with the Cover? Giant Head Cover supreme! This is a tilted Giant Head Cover, which is much less common. Also, there are two other heads attempting to horn in, but Miya Folick’s Head is simply too Giant to allow this!
How I Came To Know It: I read a review and decided to check it out. I couldn’t get this one on physical media so I ordered it as a download from Bandcamp instead, which worked just fine. Not my preferred approach to music collection, but more and more a requirement until the world comes out of its stupor and realizes that Compact Disc is a perfectly acceptable way to collect music.
How It Stacks Up: I am on the lookout for Folick’s EP released earlier this year called “2007” but for now, “Premonitions” is the only album in my collection. Consequently, it can’t stack up.
Ratings: 4 stars
For a record with so many layers of production and sonic swell, “Premonitions” is surprisingly intimate. This is a record that will make you idly sway if you were to hear it in a lineup of a coffee shop (which you won’t, because radio airplay decisions are based on accessibility, not merit). If you are lucky enough to spend a few days with it on your headphones as I just did it will fill you with an ocean swell of emotion and yearning.
Things begin with Miya Folick’s incredible vocals. She has the mysterious lounge-singer tones of k d lang on “Ingénue” combined with the atmospheric techno-siren sound of London Grammar’s Hannah Reid. This is high praise, but well-deserved. Folick has a ton of power and range, but she’s also able to shift from an ethereal head voice to a lower fine-grain sandpaper in her lower register.
Sometimes when you get this much shift in vocal performance it can make a record feel disjointed, but that never happens on “Premonitions”. Part of this is the production and arrangement, which is a primarily pop music vibe, with a soupcon of jazz dance. This sounds terrible to me reading it back, but it is done so well it overcomes my usual reticence for such forms.
More important than the production is Folick’s songwriting. Collaborating with afore-referenced producer Justin Raisen, these tunes pull the light production into dark and intensely personal places. The songs feature plenty of power dynamics – sexual and otherwise – and beneath that much more intimate explorations of self-discovery and triumph.
The record opens with “Thingamajig”, a heartfelt apology that mixes a lighthearted looping of background vocals going “uh uh uh – hay-o” with some of the rawest, most sublime lead vocals you will ever hear. Folick’s apology and surrender so abject it borders on self-hate.
Fortunately the rest of the record contextualizes this song, demonstrating that Folick may be raw at the edges but is very much OK with herself, thank you very much. “Premonitions” encourages a strength in her partner not from a position of surrender, but because the likes to be challenged.
“Stock Image” explores the thin veneer of self-assurance we present the world to hide our doubts and fears. Or as Folick puts it:
“Colour in, colour
in
Feeling empty outside of your outline
You scratch at the door of the divine
Within, colour in
You can't stand the greatness of sunshine
You hide in the bones of a stock image”
This reads cold and empty but paired with her voice peeling out in triumph you will here the strength of the song bursting out. Or as she reminds us elsewhere in the tune:
“Don't you get too
far from yourself
You're so hard on yourself
Oh, you'll get through
Only hard when you say it's too hard”
That last line is a powerful reminder that how you see the problem is a big part of successfully solving it.
The album came out in 2018, in the birth of the “Me Too” movement and on “Deadbody” Folick sets her sights squarely on those who would abuse their privilege to make it clear their time is over. Folick vibrates with rage and power as she finds her inner rock goddess singing the refrain, “over my dead body”.
“Premonitions” would be a beautiful pop record even if it didn’t have anything to say. It has jump, bounce and brilliant arrangement and vocal performance. However, it is much deeper than that and well worth a deep dive. It didn’t make my Top 10 of 2018 list but that’s only because…I was wrong. I repent: buy this record.
Best tracks: Thingamajig, Premonitions, Stock Image, Stop Talking, Freak Out, Deadbody
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