Baltimore is a difficult city to describe. Or maybe it's not a city, but a zone that hovers, lands, disappears and returns - crossing between dimensions. "Was it really here? Was I really there?" One's experiences in Baltimore vacillate between extremes of tragedy and bliss. It is an old place. By this I mean that the homogeneity and flattening of individual imagination so common within mass culture has not totally established itself there. Weirdness remains. Not weirdness™, but actual, un-characterizable weirdness because there is room in the city for the self to slow down and for the imagination to enter into a fermentation state, birthing individuals as we were meant to be: non-brand, not homo-econimus, but homo-journeyer.
All this I think as I listen to the new album,
UWU EXOTICA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, by the prolific Baltimore songwriter and ace arranger, Eyelashes! "Faintly, I'm Yours" she sings on the proto-hit, "Best Songwriter in the World" and the line is an invitation into the hazy glitter swamp (her phrase) where most things are possible, including things you have never thought of... a state of mind where "every day is fall" and where the songwriter is "prey to all beauty," for example.
Line after enchanting wordplay line is delivered with phasing like mind breaths and within a landscape of arrangements where a plastic sounding acoustic guitar may cross paths with synthetic panpipes and where the snare drum sound and groove are so direct and so real that it is more like a beckoning or a summoning than a declaration of its own importance, as the backbeat so often is in rock and pop.
What stands out on this album among the vast expanse of lilies, tree trunks and corrugated crocodile backs that comprise the other releases in the Eyelashes! glitter swamp are the melodic heights achieved in the songs, heights that are coupled with arrangements & harmonics that complement them, birthing shimmering sonic spires in the marsh.
Each song on UWU EXOTICA!!!!!!!!!!!!!! is dense with meaning and non-meaning or play, both lyrically and musically, and could merit its own individual review or reflection. I believe this richness is due to the fact that Eyelashes! has 46 medium-to-full length releases in her catalog, proceeded by 15 releases as Baggypantsrich, over the course of 16 years, and so has been developing her craft in an iconoclastic fashion, rooted in the journey of the self, for a long time. This review-of-sorts can only serve as a lamp in the doorway of the record, inviting you to enter the space...
-- DH 6/6/2024
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