In two minutes and 30 seconds, Mitski captures a loneliness we’ve all felt at one time or another. Maybe that’s a former lover, or a family member, or a friend - it doesn’t matter. The song’s narrator is desperate to be seen and to be understood, not by society at-large, but by one specific person. Yes, it’s power-chord bummer rock reminiscent of Nirvana and The Pixies, but it’s unmistakably Mitski. It’s a beautiful and incredibly vivid meditation on her own habits in relationships, and the fraught feelings that come along with these losing dogs. As she expresses this doomed dynamic and likens it to racing dogs that lose, she repeats a motif of “looking into their eyes when they’re down,” and later, her partner “looking in my eyes when I cum,” reflecting an empathetic and almost magnetic attraction towards the battered, bruised, and vulnerable. Mitski’s “I Bet On Losing Dogs” oscillates between joy and profound disappointment, almost as if she’s realizing her sealed fate in relationships, while also wearing it with pride. Hand claps, plinking piano keys, and flutes attempt to keep up with Mitski’s light, fast-paced vocals, a sticky sweetness colliding with the lyrics’ deep heartache and disappointment. When viewed as part of Mitski’s larger catalog, “Strawberry Blond” serves as a precursor of sorts to “Your Best American Girl.” Both songs are about loving someone who can’t (or simply won’t) love you back, and both serve as pointed, personal commentaries about Western beauty standards, race, and alienation.īut while the latter is a guitar-driven gut-punch, this standout track from 2013’s Retired From Sad, New Career in Business sounds almost bubbly and fleeting. She builds herself up and makes herself small repeatedly, and by the song’s climactic end, she unravels ever so slightly, all before landing on a somewhat disaffected request for a love that’s “enough to clean me up/ Clean me up, clean me up…”Īnd not only is “Love Me More” one of the most pop-centered and accessible songs in her discography, it does so without compromising Mitski’s unique ability to reflect emotional life through expressive musical choices. Mitski’s vocal performance on “Love Me More” is one of her finest amidst many carefully constructed chord shifts, Mitski remains steadfast and powerful, representing a desire for more with urgency, enthusiasm, and impressive command. The song rocks at its heights, but it’s also terribly anguished, a prime example of Mitski’s push-pull prowess. Turning all that trauma into this pearl - hard, shimmering, beautiful, but the result of an irritant trapped under ages of pressure - demonstrates her poet’s touch. There’s a delicacy in the way Mitski approaches toxicity, so often juxtaposed with some ripping guitar work. Much of her music revolves around desire and longing - even now, with the release of her sixth studio album Laurel Hell, Mitski is still delivering lines that can sum up a generation of artists’ existential angst, as well as the fraught and complicated demands of relationships. And though her later records began to feature a more polished sound, Mitski has always been in search of describing the indescribable, of articulating that which eats away at you and liberates you. Mitski rose to prominence in New York City’s DIY scene in the early 2010s, releasing her breakout third album Bury Me at Makeout Creek on the indie label Double Double Whammy before moving to Dead Oceans for 2016’s Puberty 2. And whether she’s on the guitar, the piano, or above a cascade of synths and strings, there’s always a trace of the unexpected. Her melodies play by their own rules, often elongated and delightfully piercing. Her words are acute and specific when she expresses her feelings, she does so in ways that are both universal and deeply personal at the same time. When listening to Mitski, you get the sense that each choice she makes is deliberate.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |