When we gathered, sitting on the floor, around Sea Oleena at the Portals CMJ showcase at Silent Barn in October of last year, the room was rapt with attention as she played many of the songs from Shallow with only an electric guitar as accompaniment. There were no back-of-the room chatterers spilling their beer on passersby—it was one of those rare shows quiet enough that you could hear the open space in the room. Without the thick layer of reverb used on her recordings, the clarity of her voice never wavered. She had perfected a balance between restraint and decisiveness, cutting off every quick or long note at just the right moment.
If the songs on Shallow sound delicate and distant, then, it is because she wants them to. The album hones in on a different sound from her past work, which is less pared down and somber. Her earlier albums Sea Oleena and Sleeplessness, though still dreamy and melancholic, played more with percussive elements from hip-hop and indie-pop. On Shallow, beats are sprinkled into “If I’m,” “Shallow,” and “Everyone With Eyes Closed” for a section, then pulled back. These prickly drum sounds are not the backbone of the sound but rather one of many accents. The backbone is instead her voice, and its interplay with the wistful swaths of piano and guitar.
There is a restlessness to the songs, some of which shift from one mode to another, such as opener “If I’m,” which is the closest thing to a pop song you’ll find on the album. Opening with the tense plinking of the piano and abruptly dropping into a driving beat, the song’s second half then moves into more ambient territory, the vocals stretching out over groaning strings. The song, like an object held up to the light, has one bright side and one covered in shadow. On “Vinton LA,” she takes this tendency even farther, stretching several parts over 11 minutes, expanding a beach trip into a sprawling narrative. The piano takes on a rich and wandering quality, carrying us along from one section to the next, and by the end you feel you are somewhere you had never been before. One of her strengths is the tension between one emotional space and the next, the way it contracts and expands when given the space.
Other songs allow a melodic trope to repeat itself until we are submerged in it, like a slowly filling bathtub of warm water. “Shades of Golden” allows one layer at a time to build and recede. Where this level of repetition can be dull in the wrong hands, each of her lines takes on a new life with each iteration. When she sings, “I saw the morning as a paler shade of night,” or, in “If I’m,” “If I’m the forest you’re the field at my feet,” her skewed gaze refreshes images worn down with overuse. Her tropes are the normal tropes of bedroom recorders, but she embodies them in such a committed way that they always feel vibrant.
It felt as though, when she played the Portals Living Spaces show at Silent Barn this summer, she had delved further into the part of herself that wants to pare down and stretch out. Looking monk-like with her shaved head and loose black clothing, she played a set of gorgeous, patient ambient songs. When we spoke before the show, she mentioned that these days she enjoyed playing ambient sets more than anything else and wondered how people would react if she did not meet their expectations.
The songs from Shallow, it should be noted, were finished sometime around a year ago. This is one of the strange things about the album cycle—that sometimes, by the time the album is written, recorded, refined, passed around to labels, manufactured, and released, the moment that created it has long passed. But, closing my eyes on the floor of Silent Barn again, I heard the same forcefulness of vision that I always hear in her music. I couldn’t help but feel that her execution was so effective because she was doing exactly what she wanted, rather than playing songs that fit within a promotional cycle.
As I listen yet another time to Shallow closing with the comfortingly simple “Paths,” I feel satisfaction but also anticipation. I long to know more about what new forms she will uncover working in the space between this album and whatever has transpired in her mind since it was completed. In “Everyone With Eyes Closed,” whose mood is relatively bright, she sings, “I was sliding slow away from everything I wanted before.” Perhaps the real subject of her songs, and what imbues them with their energy, is her itinerant nature itself. I, for one, am willing to follow her wherever her vision takes her next.
Shallow is out now via Lefse Records—you can buy it here.