When Cassandra Jenkins released her second album, 2021’s An Overview On Phenomenal Nature, it was in the spirit of a last hurrah. A little lost, a little disheartened, its collection of songs spoke to the dislocation of that particular time in Jenkins’ life when, following the death of David Berman, there came keen grief, a cancelled tour with Purple Mountains, a questioning of whether music was really the career for her.
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She half-sang, half spoke, her voice slow and dusky and beguiling, and wound her storytelling with richly drawn characters and field recordings: birdsong, a guided meditation, a security guard discussing a Mrinalini Mukherjee exhibit at The Met Breuer. The effect was beautiful, intimate, inquisitive, wise; a record that felt so complete, one wondered how she might ever devise a follow-up.
Jenkins wondered the same thing. My Light, My Destroyer was not an easy album to make. The success of its predecessor had led to a gruelling tour schedule and a surge of media attention, all of which left the songwriter physically and emotionally drained. Still, there came a first attempt in the studio, an effort to recreate the magic of the previous recording. And then disappointment, and a rethink. A few months later, somewhat replenished, Jenkins opted to reassemble her collaborators, among them producer, engineer and mixer Andrew Lappin, Josh Kaufman and Palehound’s Ed Kempner, and take a second shot at the new songs. This time, something bloomed.
The result is a record that confirms …Phenomenal Nature was no fluke. This is the sound of Jenkins hitting her stride – less disembodied than its predecessor, more grounded, its tone ranging from the easy warmth of Tom Petty to the steady discernment of Aimee Mann, via a little Laurie Anderson.
Jenkins draws, too, on the influence of prose writers such as Rebecca Solnit and Maggie Nelson, whose work gathers together disparate threads — the personal, the political, the observational, to create something profoundly illuminating. On …Phenomenal Nature, and perhaps even more on My Light, My Destroyer, Jenkins gives us a musical version of this essayistic approach: insights reached through studied songwriting, snippets of conversation, bursts of instrumentals (most notably the exquisite album closer, “Hayley”).
While comparisons to others are helpful, in reality Jenkins is quite distinctly her own thing, and the only true resemblance is to her previous record – there in My Light…’s field recordings, sonic turns and the subtle unfolding of these tracks. From the first lines of opener “Devotion”, Jenkins’ voice is a cool balm: “I think you’ve mistaken my desperation for devotion,” she sings, low and soft. It’s an arresting start: intriguing and elliptical and hopeful, in much the same way that …Phenomenal Nature began: “I’m a three-legged dog, working with what I got.”
As with last time, the listener instinctively leans in closer. Close enough to catch the spoken word of “Delphinium Blue” and “Attente Telephonique”, and the sensuous yearning of “Omakase” – a song named for an expensive lab-grown strawberry, and from which the album takes its title: “My lover/My light/My destroyer/My meteorite.”
At this proximity it’s easy, too, to revel in Jenkins’ observational humour – there in the casting of Sisyphus in “Only One”’s sorry tale of heartbreak, with its repeated, rolling refrain, “You’re the only one I’ve ever loved/The only one I know how to love”, in the unexpected appearances of William Shatner, and perhaps most of all in the curious details of “PetCo”, in which Jenkins wanders through a pet shop, trying to be less alone.
Most of all what infuses My Light, My Destroyer is a sense of cosmic awe. The record begins and ends at break of dawn, and at various points Jenkins looks up towards the heavens – to the ceiling, to the aeroplanes and the rocket ships and the meteorites. At others, she’s contemplating nature through glass – delphiniums and narcissus in the flower shop, the blue of earth viewed from space, the sky from a tour bus window, those laboratory strawberries and pet shop lizards.
At the album’s heart lies “Betelgeuse”, a song of lugubrious brass and rippled piano, in which a stargazing Jenkins is joined by her own mother, a science teacher, as they admire the brightness of Mars, Venus, Betelgeuse. “It’s fun to look at the moon through binoculars,” her mother says, unwittingly drawing together some of the record’s themes.
Over and again, one feels Jenkins breaking through the glass to touch the beauty of what lies beyond. “Don’t mistake my breaking open/For broken,” she sings on “Devotion”. It’s a thought that governs the record: this is the sound of an artist quietly, rapturously coming to life.
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