an album review by Nat Bourgon
Atoosa Grey’s new, riveting batch of songs helps us brave looking into the eyes of the unresolved, taciturn narratives in us that we have deferred or have kept clammed up inside. This varied, intertwined collection of earnest, soul-baring tunes encourages us to hold some space for the reticent, unvoiced goings-on in our inner worlds, to carve out our own idiosyncratic conglomeration of conversing with, expressing, and growing with and from them, in support of deepening our self-love and our interpersonal connections.
Opener “It Takes Time” tenderly opens the lines of communication with our tabled emotions, with thoughtful sensitivity and patulous openness at the helm. This song feels like a hospitable, comradely greeting addressed to our shut-off internal susurrations that we had previously sequestered to the backlots of our minds, letting our backlogged, unaddressed contemplations know that we’re available to engage in a judgment-free dialogue, with an open-door-policy for unbottling and articulating. Transcendental, reverent strings unfurl, cross-country-skiing across the inner sounding board’s trail. Grey’s patient, lento vocal delivery and her sudsy piano create a safe space for engaging with our subdued conceptualizations, for providing our thoughts with outlets for assertion with our own selves where we deem fitting. “It Takes Time” gives our vantage points the floor to speak to us with unabbreviated candor, even if our feelings are still in formation, or in less-than-fully-coherent, piecemeal sampling mode.
"It Takes Time” brings to mind the preliminary, embarking phase of a meditation cycle, and the introductory spiel in a challenging conversation with ourselves. In my perspective, “She Belongs” builds upon this preparatory terrain by conjuring up what inner dialoguing with our suppressed, cooped up emotions might feel and sound like. Musically, “She Belongs” locomotes with a twitching, squiggly ambience. This is the sound of us addressing our veiled domains, the sound of our silhouettes replying back in and out of turn, scatterbrain style. Atoosa Grey’s voice careens, conveying the teetering haze of when ambivalence and upheaval make appearances, while we are immersed in seeking to understand ourselves. As her vocal recurrently bobs between her higher-register and lower-register, I find myself grappling with the to-and-fro dynamic of how it feels impactful to air out our thoughts with ourselves and give our thoughts a voice, while I think it also feels healthy to be self-aware and mindful of how much stock we put into our thoughts.
As we converse with and learn to embrace our formerly shrouded emissions of sentiment, there is a juncture in “Night Drags On” that I feel channels the spring in our step we procure when we salute our ripples of progress, acknowledging where we have filled our cup of satiation, even as we continue to review and refine where we are tinkering. On her 2000 song “Yours”, Atoosa intoned in a heavyhearted, raw lament about when love falls short of expectations. “And if you would give me more/Then I would let it slide/And if you would show me your inside/ I would recognize you/And if you would give me more/Than I would still be yours” she dejectedly intonated. By sharing the letdowns and disappointments, it felt as though she was simultaneously demystifying what she did want in love. As a key part of the ongoing trail of attending to the experiential filaments that we previously relegated to abeyance, I admire how ‘Night Drags On” provides an opportunity for a self check-in, looking back upon past goals for love and celebrating the vision of ideal love being actualized.
In the sonically scintillant, shimmying “Night Drags On”, when she spiritedly sings “What’s yours is what’s mine/I’m yours and that’s what we become in time/And the pieces that don’t mix/Leave them alone and watch them fly”, I begin envisioning her previous 2000 song “Yours” as a past diary entry, with unadorned, jotted down word-based scribbling of her sagas with love back then, and outlining her hopes for her love department’s future verses. Twenty-one years later, “Night Drags On” feels like discovering this journal from two decades ago, found wedged deeply under the couch, and ruminating on its lens of what love entails, and on the forward motion that has taken place since that journaling session from eons ago. It feels like a harkening back to revisit goals initially set in “Yours” to honour the fulfillment that has been manifested in love, post-journal entry and a tipping of the hat to our personalized, continually evolving conception of ideal love. This lyrical easter egg in “Night Drags On” feels like a reveling in the way that intention setting is a guiding, contributing step towards manifestation. “Night Drags On” feels like an outlet of gratitude for ideal love brought to fruition and continuing to develop daily, and an ode to the marvelous effects of intention setting itself.
Studious sounding cello accentuates the irriguous, swampy vibe of title track “Dear Darkness.” The song feels like the proceedings are taking place on a tenebrous seabed. Initially as Atoosa starts singing “And there’s no way out of this place”, there is a drooping exasperation to her delivery. Yet, as the song continues wayfaring, her singing cultivates the traits of a consoling fulgor, increasingly punctuating her vocalizations with radixes of succor. When she emotes the second half of her lyrical sentiment “And there’s no way out of this place/Unless I grow my wings from gills”, it feels as though she is now scenting the possibilities, enunciating with the upreared, resolute ministration of a solution’s sire.
Atoosa’s work creates and gestates worlds enlivened with interlacing threads. I visualize that her songs contain built-in creative foyers that limn her inlets of continuity. Atoosa provides lyrical and sonic entranceways to each of the narrative swathes she introduces and fleshes out, italicizing the recurring thematic entries of expression tasseling across her albums.
This continuum of detail that Atoosa Grey generously affords her songs is exemplified in “All These Things” when a flurried, unanticipated sound emerges. This surprising sound evokes imagery for me of a clan of birds immersed in flight liftoff. This bird imagery especially resonates, as the addition of this launching-into-flight sound feels like a nod to Atoosa’s previous album title “When the Cardinals Come.” When I process the title “When the Cardinals Come”, I imagine it as a metaphor for love taking flight. As “All These Things” unfolds, I hear a continuance of this thread as if Grey is now following up to provide a sequel to this narrative, filling us in on what airborne love feels like. I feel that there is an interesting interplay at work here between the subliminal manner that this thread emerges, through sound, and the way that the thread is later brought further into discernment, when the birds are referenced directly through her lyrics, when she sings “When the birds/Fill the roof/When they whirl/Two by two/When you’re well/When you feel like hell/You can call/I won’t tell”, voicing the avail of empathy lovingly.
Atoosa’s choice of vocal octaves for this song provides an additional synergetic link to “When the Cardinals Come.” At times in “All These Things”, she momentarily veers from her variety-centric, venturesome vocal approach she utilizes throughout the album “Dear Darkness” to hone in on scaling the seraphic spheres of her head voice, the singing coordinates she delved into throughout much of “When the Cardinals Come.” There is such impact in her songwriting’s ongoing discourse of binding ties, in the groovy ways that Atoosa Grey’s ideas and thematic voyages in her songs interact with and build upon one another.
There is an eerie, ghostly mysteriousness afoot in the sonic topography of “Storms.” Wary, jittery piano drizzles into a misty reservoir of baffling, risky questions. Orchestra-based reverberations audit for the truth, like a journalist considering all angles, aiming to discern the ostensibly unfathomable. Woodwind-sounding instrumentation later admixes in like a timely installment of motherly wisdom, helping contribute to clarity’s cause. As Atoosa’s voice morphs from singing to a spoken word-singing hybrid to a near-chant, the prevalent mood measuredly transitions from avid tension to a sigh of relief’s nourishment. “Storms” contains Atoosa’s knack for poetic communication in abundance, as when she expresses the lyrical revelation “In the thorns where I never should’ve worn this one/Never should’ve thought there was no danger/In changing for anyone.”
Cantering, blithesome guitar carpools compatibly with Atoosa’s vocals in penultimate track “Let Light Through.” There is an initiative-ready energy that abounds here, which effectuates an uplifting aroma. When zeroing in on the melodic constituents at work and when concentrating on Atoosa’s determined vocal inflexion, my mind begins gazing into the ongoing expedition of proactive self-accountability and its sheer value. I hear this parlance of viewing oneself as the lead architect of our undertakings and our standpoints in the lyrical proceedings, as Atoosa fervently sings “Want you to know/I need peace/I’ll close my eyes and breath deep”, affirming how much of a difference-maker and agent for change we can truly be in our own trajectories when we claim self-accountability for our reality.
Album closer “Chapters” feels ceremonial, akin to participating in a cathartic ritual of truth expressing. As she shares the courageous, gutsy sentiment “After I had a baby all I wanted was to pretend/Very little had changed/But everybody said then again/Around the bend, slow down, so then/I dragged myself to the piano in a robe/And I asked myself what new things did I think I needed to know/I felt like a kid/Just like my kid”, I take note that this is truth-telling with realness and grace, epitomized, complete with from-the-heart intoning and textured, enlightened sound bowl-adjacent chimes.
Atoosa Grey’s new album reaches the soul of our multitudes, as we lean into our veracity, as we partake in self-discovery, as we navigate growth. “Dear Darkness” is a moving toast to the impactful love that inhabits attentive listening, to our inner world’s realms, to each other.
