Cassandra Jenkins – My Light, My Destroyer (2024) [FLAC 24bit/48kHz]

Cassandra Jenkins – My Light, My Destroyer (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 36:49 minutes | 420 MB | Genre: Indie Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Dead Oceans

Cassandra Jenkins is quite simply one of the best songwriter-storytellers currently making music. Hers is a specific and singular corner of the Great American Songwriters, artists like David Berman, Adrianne Lenker, Jeff Tweedy and Sufjan Stevens. They’re artists connected by a sense of immediacy, not just in the writing – which is precise, evocative, brutal at times, pitch-back funny right when you need it – but by their delivery, by the way they sing with an immersive, total belief that carries you through their songs. These are the artists and songs that sneak up and really live with us forever, and on My Light, My Destroyer, Jenkins joins their ranks. What’s most remarkable about My Light, My Destroyer is it captures an artist at an exciting leap in her evolution. So much about the album feels of-a-kind with its predecessors; field recordings and found sound permeate, narrative songwriting crashes into heady, swirling compositions. Jenkins sings with what can only be described as a power-whisper (think Sufjan Stevens, Annie Lennox, Margo Timmins or YHF-era Tweedy), her vocals up close and intimate but subtly confrontational. But it all feels bigger here, more finely honed, bolder and richer than her previous work and than her peers.Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Cassandra Jenkins—who has performed as a back-up singer for Eleanor Friedberger and Craig Finn—can fit her steady, calm North Star of a voice to almost any situation. She’s not a shape-shifter so much as a fixed constant around which the music finds a way to flow. On the slow-moving, dark and lovely jazz of “Tape and Tissue,” she sounds so close you can almost hear her lips brushing the microphone; the musical tension builds, but she remains chill. Co-produced by Katie Von Schleicher of Wilder Maker (along with Andrew Lappin, who worked on every song), “Clams Casino” is excellent—a country rocker à la 1970s Linda Ronstadt, with scorching guitar and strident drums. You can hear where and how another artist might belt it, but Jenkins keeps it at a low, slow simmer. Dreamy “Delphinium Blue,” meanwhile, gives off Enya vibes with ghostly backing vocals, random industrial percussion and Jenkins’ voice pouring slow as honey. Produced with Isaac Eiger (Strange Ranger, Threshold) and Von Schleicher, it’s about how a flower-shop job saved Jenkins during “one of the bluest periods” of her life, as “I began to dream in technicolor; flowers became the language of my subconscious.” (“I sweep the floors but I’m talking to you,” she sings. “I see your eyes in the delphinium too/ I’ve become a servant to their blue.”) Jenkins’ violinist brother Reid helped arrange and plays on several of the tracks, including “Hayley,” which trembles with the power of a deceptively fragile hummingbird, and “Aurora, IL.” Co-arranged with Rob Moose, who played violin on Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois and with Anohni and My Brightest Diamond, the strings on the latter swell and bloom, almost like fireworks. Free-floating and ghostly “Omakase” evokes Mitski (who Jenkins has toured with) while “Petco” is a pretty classic ’90s-style indie rocker—woozy guitar, punchy dynamics—but without any lo-fi fuzz to cloud it. There is serene clarity as Jenkins sings, “It’s become my second nature/ To wander through the pet store/ And stare into the sideways gaze of a lizard/ Doesn’t always make me feel better/ Just less alone.” And there’s a neat trick on “Only One,” its mood set by cool-zephyr sax, where the chorus rushes, almost like an editor has snipped out milliseconds and Jenkins seems to be hop-skipping at a new pace. – Shelly Ridenour

Tracklist:

1-1. Cassandra Jenkins – Devotion (03:55)
1-2. Cassandra Jenkins – Clams Casino (03:26)
1-3. Cassandra Jenkins – Delphinium Blue (03:37)
1-4. Cassandra Jenkins – Shatner’s Theme (00:44)
1-5. Cassandra Jenkins – Aurora, IL (03:37)
1-6. Cassandra Jenkins – Betelgeuse (02:54)
1-7. Cassandra Jenkins – Omakase (04:45)
1-8. Cassandra Jenkins – Music?? (00:10)
1-9. Cassandra Jenkins – Petco (03:03)
1-10. Cassandra Jenkins – Attente Téléphonique (01:31)
1-11. Cassandra Jenkins – Tape and Tissue (04:22)
1-12. Cassandra Jenkins – Only One (03:09)
1-13. Cassandra Jenkins – Hayley (01:31)

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