Annie Blackman’s journey from Montclair, New Jersey, to Gambier, Ohio, to Brooklyn, New York, has led her to use the milieu of one’s twenties as armor against a world that can easily erode at one’s confidence, consciousness, and sense of self. For Blackman’s inner-Jersey girl, her latest album, All of It (via Father/Daughter Records), executive produced by Evan Rasch, is about recollection, regrouping, and learning to find a new identity outside of “student.” The ten-track debut is stuffed with themes of longing, insecurity, and the raw sarcasm of someone who’s seen too much in too short a time; but still feels like they’re playing catch-up with the world.
All of this is done with the sharp lullaby of Blackman’s voice, overlaid by choral arrangements echoing as if she is singing a duet with her neon-lit reflection at a party she didn’t want to go to. On the Bandcamp page for the record, Blackman expands on this feeling as she writes, “there’s a kind of necessary bloodletting that comes at the end of college—a moment of reckoning with the past before you decide to get on with the rest of your life. Maybe you move back home, stew it over while the big questions start to tug at you. Who am I, for now? And when will my life begin?”
For better or worse, this realization is quite personal as I’m coming up on my senior year of college. The threat of grad school looms like an oncoming storm, and the idea of moving away from New York City back to the Philadelphia suburbs is as soothing and numbing as novocaine. I could save up and travel. I could write a book. I could get married and have a kid. I could party and disappoint my parents. I could get another tattoo instead of going to therapy. I could get arrested at a protest. The world is in my hands now, but somehow, I am paralyzed by its magnanimity. Yet, in my rattled duality of feeling both overgrown and underprepared; I will do what I’ve done since my middle school days listening to St. Vincent, Lorde, and PJ Harvey – I’ll have a sad white woman croon about the woes of a life that seems to have gotten away from them.
“Why We Met” is the swaying opener. It’s the lover you see in the streets of your hometown chugging back countless cans of sweating beer, but who might you not even be able to call to mind years later? The haunting chorus sang in Greek lilts behind Blackman as her voice questions whether or not all the six packs in the world can make us forget. Drenched in all the graying nostalgia of driving through the place you grew up and fighting the realization that you’ve outgrown it but unsure where to stretch your hands from here, it’s a stellar opening paragraph.
“Drive” attempts to find an answer in the golden shoulders of California. A complete contrast from the introductory track, “Drive” is sunny and sardonic. Idealizing moving away not just for school or work, but because you have to – because your life craves something other than the suburbs of North Jersey (or whatever suburbia you find yourself running from). You can hear the fragments of giggles in Blackman’s voice as she writes about vilifying new women and being so afraid to drive on California highways that she would wander the offramps as if stoned. Similar to Lorde’s “Writer in the Dark,” where she croons, “I love it here since I stopped needing you.” Annie Blackman holds the same righteous resentment from several time zones away, “a city’s more than its proximity to you.” There’s a healthy smattering of religious guilt which dissipates when Blackman realizes that Jesus died to forgive us for making fools of ourselves, so she should cash in on that redemption while she can. Similarly, I feel the same when I’m drunk and high and full of ribs at a rooftop barbeque in Brooklyn. This is life. It’s not inherently awful or inherently good – it’s just mine, and that’s enough.
“Souvenir” is one of the more difficult tracks on the record because of how hard it hits – it also serves as a public service announcement on why you shouldn’t hook up with your hometown ex over Thanksgiving. “Souvenir” is striking despite its absence of choral arrangement and restrained guitar work. The song’s bittersweet tones play out like the realization that your fickle lover will never reciprocate your efforts no matter how hard you love them. Blackman’s emotions are strung between the feelings of numbness as though she’s getting away with some heinous crimes. It’s particularly harsh because of its brevity, possibly similar to how quick, efficient, and business-like the sex, as mentioned earlier on the track, is. Either way, the closing stanza, “it is what it is / soft and sweet and meaningless / don’t forget that I was here / the soreness in my legs; a souvenir,” is so chilling I want it tattooed and also never want to hear it uttered again.
“Seeds” is the sister song to “Souvenir.” While the opening line, “I’d like you to apologize in cursive in between my thighs,” feels like a punch to the gut as it tapers off, it then lacks the same rawness and evocative imagery of the earlier tracks like “Souvenir” included. Although Blackman’s voice and wayward guitar are always welcoming, “Seeds” is wallpaper at a basement party, a slight style flair but easily becomes lost in the smoke and flashing lights. Conversely, the following song, “‘Power,”’ builds quickly and roils. Blackman’s voice carries, but it is less a lullaby rather a sleep paralysis demon or the feeling of being taken under powerful medication before you’re ready. She growls, sardonically and proud on the closer. “Maybe I made you less numb” is a line she repeats several times to the point where you’re unsure if she’s trying to drive it home or convince whoever will listen that this person needed her, to begin with.
The second track, “Glitch,” is yet another highlight on the record. Blackman uneasily sits in a dark, funny, people-pleasing hell. It’s full of hard-hitting quotables like, “if we’re all 1’s and 0’s, why do I feel so blue / who cares if it’s constructed, I’d still die if I jumped off the roof,” and “all I want is approval from the people who I pay to talk to me.” It calls to mind the smiling, hateful tracks of Penelope Scott or even the trepidatious longing of Aldous Harding’s “‘Designer.” Also, I’m generally in love with how Blackman sings ‘Ativan’ on the chorus. It’s a crystallization of trying to ‘do the work’ with one’s mental health but being the first to admit that you’re not sure if insurance covers the general feelings of uneasiness as well as depersonalization that comes with being AFAB or living under late-stage capitalism.
Routine nihilism and unabashed self-centeredness marry in the very short but striking closer, “‘Nothing Relents.” Blackman could care less about a funeral when she’s had a bad day and is consumed by the thoughts that perhaps she has outgrown this corporeal form. The tinkling guitar truly feels like the credits are rolling as if Blackmanlike Annie has stuffed the detritus of her life in the trunk and is watching her hometown fade from the freeway. Life, in general, doesn’t revolve around her. Graduations, weddings, and the announcements of pregnancies from her high school ‘friends’ on Facebook remind her of that. However, her life does revolve around her. The car won’t move unless she starts it, and despite her fear of driving, she’s speeding off –- destination unknown, but still tangible as the feeling of the wheel in her hands.
I listened to this record three times in preparation for this review, and I’m currently writing it in my childhood bedroom. I didn’t move until college. My entire life can be mapped out by eighty-something miles of highway between Philadelphia and New York City. You can carbon date what phase I was in by the posters on my walls and the pirated music on my computer. Yet, as I’ve grown and moved away and seen more –- the comforts of my hometown have grown small and itchy like a beloved Christmas sweater from when you were a kid. Your parents are no longer superheroes or supervillains but deeply flawed people whom you must learn to love again (or not for your own sake). Everyone seems in a race to move on to the next phase of your life while you are, as Mitski calls it, crying like a tall child. In your twenties, your life will move on so long as you continue to draw breath. For Annie Blackman, she looks at the gaping maw of adulthood, of work and relationships and ‘getting your shit together’ and she takes a graceful, running leap into gods know what. All of It addresses these themes and more.
Annie Blackman’s album All of It (via Father/Daughter Records) is available where music is streamed, including Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music, or for purchase on Bandcamp. What are your thoughts on the album? Share your comments below in the comment section.
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