“Little Oblivions” by Julien Baker
By Connor Dillman
In 2021, dropping the needle on a record titled Little Oblivions causes an all too familiar lump of cynicism to well up in the throat. We’ve learned to approach even the smallest respites from this period of extended loneliness with hesitancy, understanding that the highs they bring imply inevitable crashes of equal proportion in their wake. In a year where we’ve all been forced to turn inward and live in these lows, we’re long overdue for an artist to step up and show us how to do so.
Enter Julien Baker, who has chewed herself up and spat herself back out into a third album that writhes with catharsis in the chaos of her mind’s muddiest waters. These songs are stories of survival—of support systems running the gauntlet of addiction, of love and faith tested by self-doubt, of trauma tearing through memory like a forest fire—and while these lyrical themes don’t stray very far from those she’s explored in her earlier work, the sound that surrounds them evolves well beyond the sparse compositions she has built her career on to date. Where her last record Turn Out the Lights left ample space for her confessions to percolate, Little Oblivions thickens her production with a new cast of characters—synths, organ, banjo, drums, bass, and mandolin—the majority of which were performed by Baker herself.
The album was recorded in Memphis, Baker’s hometown, during the initial whispers of pandemic panic between December ‘19 and January ‘20, which amplifies the striking physicality of its imagery: scenes of emotional destruction, rendered in vivid streaks of flesh and blood. “Oh, faith healer, come put your hands all over me” Baker calls out in the chorus of “Faith Healer,” the record’s lead single and initial indicator that this batch of music finds its heartbeat in the body. The song also introduces the album’s visual world with a video featuring identical twin soldiers in combat uniforms wrestling each other through the halls of an empty church in grunting spurts. The sweat-flecked metaphor comes through clear: on this project, Baker is locking horns with herself.
On “Hardline,” the album’s opener, she gets right to it:
When it finally gets to be too much
I always told you you could leave at any time
Until then I’ll split the difference between medicine and poison
Take what I can get away with while it burns right through my stomach
These words tremble over a ringing guitar line that descends through gloom to eventually arrive at a chilling declaration: “I can see where this is going / but I can’t find the brake,” she howls as cymbals then crash around her like a tidal wave of exploding machinery. It’s the first of many moments of sensory overload across the album that mirror the turbulent patterns of addiction—nearly every song slowly builds from an innocent beginning to a dizzying blackout that the listener only escapes when the dappled sunlight of the following track fades in. Such is the case on “Crying Wolf,” where a full-bodied piano and a ghostly choir of background vocals accompany her as she sings about slipping under the influence with a partner before waking up naked and exposed the following morning, only to admit that “in the evening” she’ll “come back again.” A fluttering vocal melody then carries “Beat myself until I’m bloody / And I’ll give you a ringside seat” over a jagged guitar riff chugging through the shadows of “Ringside.” From the ache in her voice, it almost sounds as though she’s narrating her self-sabotage in real time, creating and then resisting an inherently self-fulfilling prophecy.
It’s in the comedown from these bruising experiences that Baker finds clarity, but it’s not the calming kind—even when the dust has settled, she’s acutely aware of her propensity to kick it right back up into her own face no matter the context. “If I didn’t have a mean bone in my body / I’d find some other way to cause you pain,” she croons on “Relative Fiction” as reverb-drenched guitars blanket a filtered drum loop that sounds like a steady procession of faraway gunshots. “I wish that I drank / because of you and not only because of me,” she sings with air-piercing crispness on “Song in E” while playing alone on a piano placed in the record’s most minimally-produced landscape. The album’s knee-buckling knockout punch, though, comes on “Favor,” where her pen lands on the heartbreaking consequence of living by such vicious cycles: “Told you the only kin I knew / Is who I could see from the gurney.”
What, then, are we to make of Baker presenting her demons with such candor? Perhaps the answer lies in the choice to present them in the first place. While visions of hope are always required to make it through the most trying of times, there’s a certain reassurance to be felt from seeing an artist with a significant platform stumble through the darkest corners of her psyche, out of breath and exhausted as she goes. “Tired of collecting my scars,” she gently murmurs on the album’s final track “Ziptie,” which ends with a pulse-like beeping from what sounds like a bedside patient monitor. It’s a planet-wide sentiment at this point, but hearing it come from her reminds us to see those scars for what they are: a part of the human condition and doing their best to heal, just like all of us.
Connor Dillman is a writer and visual artist based in Los Angeles. He received his BA in English at Emory University and is currently studying Fine Arts at Otis College of Art and Design. He spent a good chunk of his early life on baseball fields around the world, but now he feels most at home by the ocean or on dark dance floors.
