Who’s Charlotte Cornfield? The video for “Reduce and Dry,” a single from her new album Might Have Completed Something, solutions the query with a lifelong collage of dwelling video footage. She begins in a youngsters’s choir, sporting a halo of blonde curls, dimpled cheeks, and a nostril so buttony it belongs on a teddy bear’s sweater. We watch her develop up, get glasses, chop these curls. She leaves the choir behind and begins to noodle on an electrical guitar. She exhibits off data by the Beatles, Neil Younger, and Joni Mitchell. By the conclusion, she is eight months pregnant and surrounded on a small stage by a band in all black.
It’s clear that Cornfield is aware of herself, at the same time as the remainder of the world remains to be coming to know her. Her final album, the spry and witty Highs within the Minuses, garnered sufficient consideration that the Toronto-based artist was capable of embark on her first U.S. tour. She recorded Might Have Completed Something with producer Josh Kaufman of Bonny Mild Horseman, her first time extending the artistic course of past her tight-knit group of mates. Nonetheless, even with a broader viewers and a brand new collaborator, her work retains the cozily selfmade really feel of the sooner music.
Might Have Completed Something is an alt-folk report unmoored from place and time. “You and Me” begins at Toronto’s Lester B. Pearson Airport, traverses three states in a Subaru, and winds up within the Rocky Mountains. Summer time sunsets in Phoenix share time with a playground laid naked by winter. She goes to see the Magnetic Fields in Montreal; she wonders whether or not to color her partitions “white or Los Angeles blue.” And it’s by no means clear whether or not she beloved the themes of her love songs 10 years or two days in the past. Youthful imagery like bike helmets and ice cream cones dance alongside automobile crashes and epitaphs.
The tales Cornfield tells are slippery, non-linear. When she scores tickets to that sold-out Magnetic Fields present, she sings, slyly, “That gave me factors with you/That I went on to make use of,” and holds her date’s hand because the band will get onstage. However then, the track appears to spiral out: She feels sick and needs to be alone; she’ll by no means recover from the connection; she asks her associate to go away; she says the man is evil then regrets it. What actually occurred? Something, wherever, at any time: Cornfield doesn’t want, or need, us to know the specifics.
Generally, this spare high quality works in opposition to the album. Might Have Completed Something shouldn’t be even a half-hour lengthy—so transient it resists being held. No sooner is the listener in Cornfield’s thrall than the report is over and her spell is damaged. Nonetheless, Cornfield’s phrases linger lengthy after the report is over, thanks partly to her pretty and understated vocal supply: a capacious alto, generously raspy, the affect of Lucinda Williams plain. She’s additionally intelligent as all hell, given to musical wordplay. On “Nowhere,” she performs a solitary sport of name and response—“Nowhere! Nowhere! Nothing! Nothing!”—to amplify her loneliness. “In From the Rain” underscores her impatience with a fickle lover: “Ready fooooor you to say one thing,” she sings, holding the notice for aeons. A snare sizzles underneath the anaphora of opener “Light Just like the Medicine.” The selection to repeat “I see… I see… I see…” relatively than describe the photographs outright creates distance between Cornfield and her listener. However then, that’s the purpose. Her visions, already compelling on the web page, throw off sparks when she conjures them aloud.
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