In Joanne Robertson’s oil work, thick knots of purple and brown typically seem within the decrease left-hand nook. They push again towards the sloshes of pale coloration as a visible analogue for the way her music works. These reds and browns are just like the rhythmic unrest on the coronary heart of her serene songs, the place melodies twist and buckle and collapse. And like her frequent collaborator Dean Blunt, Robertson’s visible apply bleeds into her music, shaping its rigidity and movement. She wanders with supple precision throughout each canvas and tune in an improvisatory state, nevertheless it’s in music that she comes closest to the divine.
Blurrr, Robertson’s sixth solo album and her undisputed masterpiece, is at factors so lovely—53 seconds into “At all times Had been,” to be precise, or 4 minutes, 31 seconds into “Peaceable”—that it feels tough to breathe alongside it. Right here, Robertson sounds as if she has reached a stratosphere the place the soul can stretch its legs and roam extra freely. It’s scarcely conceivable that Robertson recorded the album inside the confines of a room, constructed from earthly materials, someplace inside a metropolis. For its practically 45-minute length, there may be solely this.
The sound of Blurrr may finest be likened to the Cocteau Twins calling from inside the home: a lo-fi rendering of the band’s lovely slurry. Like Elizabeth Fraser, Robertson makes a voice really feel a lot bigger than the phrases it carries, although she isn’t singing with an alien tongue a lot as blurring phrases into tonal brushstrokes. If Fraser’s present was a type of ecstatic, non-linguistic invention, Robertson’s errs nearer to that means. Her lyrics hover simply past grasp, vaguely intelligible however by no means absolutely yielded. Grouper is one other apparent level of comparability: each artists summon an immense solitude, with melodies and lyrics that appear dredged from half-buried incidents and associations, as if carried throughout distant distances and centuries earlier than reaching us. Robertson, although, gathers these fragments into her voice, which doesn’t simply bear them ahead however distills them; purified within the very act of singing.
On tracks like “Robe,” the place she absolutely opens her melodic vary, her voice is all craving and struggling. Even in moments when her phrasing feels extra provisional and hesitant, as on “Ghost,” it seems that she is trying to stake a declare on the infinite. Her voice and guitar zigzag round each other, hardly ever colliding into melodic symmetry. Her voice the blur, her guitar the livid purple and brown tangles; by no means only a scaffold however a tactile object that thuds with wooden and wire, every string caught mid-rattle, harmonics clanging.
