The protagonist of Mitski's new album Nothing's About to Happen to Methe eighth, is a woman who lives in a neglected house. “Outside the house she has deviant behavior, inside the house she is free.” From a thematic and musical point of view we are on the same line as The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We of 2023. Even in that case, literary-flavored stories of the hardships of those who live in small towns were expressed with indie folk enriched by orchestrations.
It is the first time that an artist like Mitski, ambitious and therefore restless and able to move from indie to Puberty 2 to the synth pop of Laurel Helldoes not change style from the point of view of music and lyrics. Evidently for her the little houses of the mythology of the American province, mythology in decline, are still sufficiently haunted by ghosts to offer her the inspiration for some short stories.
“I would never live in a small town, I'm too slow to learn all the rules,” says Mitski's wistful heroine over the sweet, languid accompaniment of banjo and accordion in the album's opening song, In a Lake. This sense of constriction is combined in the piece with the sensation of floating alone on the water. Any trace of sentimentality is, however, immediately put aside Where's My Phonethe most direct rock song on the album.
The music of a good part of the album is a sort of modernized countrypolitan with strings, steel guitar and wind instruments to give substance to treatises on solitude that are all in all serene as Cats or Instead of Herewith lines like “forgive me, I will open the box of my old friend pain” that convey a feeling of both comfort and desperation. Things get darker in Dead Woman which talks about betrayal, murder and memory, although it would seem that the macabre drama takes place entirely in the narrator's head and not in the real world.
Mitski has never been afraid to think big, and there are particularly uncanny moments here. Even staring at the neighborhood stray cat, as happens in The White Catbecomes a disturbing showdown: “It's supposed to be my house, but apparently according to the cats it's now his house.” There are also dogs, which enter the scene Charon's Obola sweet and melancholy country song with backing vocals that sound like they came out of an Elvis record from the 1950s. There a pack of puppies watches over their dead master's house, in funereal silence.
Mitski is at his best in his descriptions of humanity reduced to its bare minimum. If I Leave pairs the nostalgic setting with a slow, grand epic of distorted guitars. On music that can recall the now classic Your Best American Girl from ten years ago, Mitski intones a desolate lyric with both threat and catharsis within.
The album ends with Lightningwhich sits somewhere between Mazzy Star and My Bloody Valentine with the music swelling around the lyrics about a violent storm. “Could I come back like the rain?” asks the narrator. It is in these moments of primordial character that the withering beauty and the sense of freedom that are at the center of Nothing's About to Happen to Me they manage to give us a glimpse of a piece of the eternal.
From Rolling Stone US.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
