The album’s called This is My Hand and if that’s what my hand looked like, I’d call my album that too…
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[4.67]
Jonathan Bogart: Of all the comparisons I had ready to go, Nellie McKay was the one I was least expecting.
[5]
Patrick St. Michel: Saturday-afternoon drumline meets high school drama club. It’s a combination that should result in pure cringe, but My Brightest Diamond’s commitment to this style takes it to a far more interesting place than expected. It still gets a little too serious at times — the color-naming interlude is a bit much — but overall this finds a nice balance.
[6]
Micha Cavaseno: The world’s greatest display of yearning for a Tony Award without actually writing a musical.
[2]
Alfred Soto: The bass synth under the “I tried to do it alright” refrain, acoustic bass, the stop-start structure — except for the martial drums at the beginning none of this is showboating. As a statement of proficiency, this impressed me. Here you have it, folks: tUnE-yArDs writing for Anita Ward.
[7]
W.B. Swygart: For a song that shoves together this many elements, it’s weird how there’s never any element of surprise. MBD’s voice is distressingly pedestrian, and when the “Di-munds” refrain lumps back into view at around three minutes the lack of spark feels almost insulting.
[3]
Anthony Easton: Very Kate Bushy, but I love the ominousness of the introductory percussion track.
[4]
Brad Shoup: I’ll tell you where there’s no pressure: on songwriters to get off carbon’s jock. Worden sends in orchestral sections like a field general, ordering her soldiers to certain slaughter. Much more thought was put into where the flutes should go than, say, giving a compelling sonic cast to anything. It’s mystery-show library music, where the timbre doesn’t matter as much since it’s in the background.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: Shara Worden is one of dozens of creatively omnivorous art-pop songwriters who go under the radar, because to survive in the music world as a female singer-songwriter you must fit into a hype category, a genre tag, a Beats Music recommendation. You must be, and Worden is not, cool-pop like Grimes or FKA Twigs, or dark-pop like Zola Jesus or Lykke Li, or, barring that, a Serious Not-Pop Songwriter like Eleanor Friedberger or Sharon Von Etten. Every so often someone from this genre receives genuine hype and is respected on artistic terms — this generation, it’s St. Vincent — but more often they’re deliberate artists who don’t fully make the hype cycle: Jenny Hval, Anna Calvi, Carina Round, Jesca Hoop, Laura Mvula, Lianne La Havas. Why so little press? Why no press? At its worst, this music is just boring — astute readers will note the order of those names — but more often the problem’s in the marketing: too sophisticated for parties, too unyielding for ads, too unconcerned with the youth demo and too dubious a pitch to a music press that still covers female artists reluctantly. As a result, Worden’s This Is My Hand is a phenomenal artistic leap forward that’ll be on few people’s year-end lists. “Pressure” is a little too blasé to be a standout, but that midsection, a relentless industrial careen that ends in a twinkle, like the I Love Lucy factory scene set on a runaway roller coaster, or maybe like Jezzball in hell, is gripping.
[6]
Scott Mildenhall: In making the connection between pressure and diamonds Shara Worden was well within her rights to take the rest of the day off, but that would have forestalled an arrangement so elaborate. Sometimes it works — the myriad Mvulan cacophonies — but overall it straddles a line between containment and Elaine Paige jazzhands too inconsistently.
[5]