‘Paradise Pop.10’ feels like you have found an unpublished collection of short stories, scrawled hastily on the sides of airsickness bags and cocktail napkins, each one detailing the life of the unwitting passenger fortunate enough to be seated next to Christian Lee Hutson on their flight to Fort Worth.
Anyone who has had the good fortune of falling in love with his first two records know that he is a keen observer of both himself and the world. From the first line of the first song on this new album, “Tonight your name is Charlotte / In a play within a play,” he reminds the listener that he is again weaving a web of autobiographical fiction. However, this time he has somehow both simplified and sharpened his style.
On ‘Paradise Pop. 10’ you will visit the CC Club in Minneapolis, a San Francisco stage production of a Tom Stoppard play, a bowling alley at the Jersey Shore, and a 2003 Subaru where two dads consider kissing each other after a game of pick-up basketball. Despite how broad the world Hutson creates is, the album gives you the impression that you are at an airport gate of sorts, and all these characters are gathered together, waiting for their lives to begin. They make light conversation with each other as their flight continues to be delayed…just another 15 minutes.
Recorded at Figure 8 in Brooklyn NY, the lifelong Los Angelino and his frequent collaborators Phoebe Bridgers, Marshall Vore, and Joseph Lorge ventured east to make ‘Paradise Pop. 10’ and picked up some friends along the way. Maya Hawke co-wrote and sang harmony on the sharp and shoegaze-y earworm “Carousel Horses.” This song is a spiritual sequel to “Age Difference,” a single from Christian’s last record, which depicts the crumbling of an unbalanced love affair. “You shouldn’t feel stupid/ I just knew before you did/ Now I’m sitting here spinning my wheels/ I bet you know how that feels.”
Accompanied by Shahzad Ismaily’s synths, Hutson’s voice shines most clearly on “After Hours.” He sings from a condominium in a corporatized Heaven to the woman he misses back on earth. “Big budget productions of the lives of your loved ones / The good stuff is behind a paywall”. Though the citizens of this Heaven are offered daily glimpses into life on Earth, our narrator prefers to imagine the minutiae of his love’s routine while he waits for her to join him.
One of the albums most sparse tracks, “Flamingos,” finds Hutson at the piano backed by Phoebe Bridgers singing harmony. In this song we catch a glimpse of an anxious traveler, fresh off a flight from Tokyo, as he weaves and bobs through a crowd to reunite with a girlfriend. “I’m taking the red eye over the dateline / A sea of slow walkers all taking their sweet time.” As he describes what he sees in her, we see him struggle to resist the urge to point out the differences between them, always reminding her of the score. “Losers remember the people who won / Winners are never afraid to lose / You only think about falling in love / I only think about you”. The listener is left with the question; if you love someone as they are, could you ever really lose?
The record is somehow both literary and unpretentious, maybe best exhibited in the final track, “Beauty School”. Katy Kirby sings backing vocals on this surprising pop-punk tinged dose of poolside folk rock. “In a mirror universe / Time is moving in reverse / I’m gonna turn my life around / everything is different now.” The lyrics to this chorus call back to that of another song from the record; “Candyland.” “Dismantling my time machine / I’ll probably put back together for the final scene.” Again, Hutson gives the keen listener the impression that he is actively re-narrativizing his life. That he has wound up somewhere he never thought he would be and is trying to wrap his head around how not to ruin it.
‘Paradise Pop. 10’ takes its name from a real life “town” set deep in the woods of Parke County, Indiana, near where Hutson spent some of his childhood. There, just past the population sign, you’ll find a row of 5 houses on one side of the road and a cemetery on the other. It could feel like a limbo of sorts, like time is frozen; leaving room for your mind to wander either backward into your regrets of the past or forward into the future, into the unknown. But if you can learn to quiet these thoughts, you might realize, you aren’t waiting at all. There is no delay. You are living. You are here.
On the ground level of an apartment building in Manhattan’s Chinatown, multiple lithium batteries combusted in an e-bike shop. It was just after midnight when songwriter Allegra Krieger awoke to a banging on her door. She made it out, fleeing down eight flights of stairs and a “wall of grey smoke,” which she recalls in her song, “One or the Other.” Throughout the song, Krieger cradles gratitude and conjures a universe in which she responded differently to the fire. Ultimately, she leaves us with two questions: “What do we know about living? What do we know about dying?”
It was in the months following the fire that Krieger wrote much of Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine, her second full-length album with Double Double Whammy, a collection of 12 songs that pick at the fragile membrane between life and death.
Krieger’s previous album, I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane, hewed more closely to the domestic spaces of city and mind. Rolling Stone regarded the album as “ten songs of heady philosophical meanderings packed with emotional dynamite,” and likened her “finely phrased lyrics” to those of “Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, [and] David Berman.” Krieger’s existential meditations remain on Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine, however her meandering melodies have taken on a stronger sense of direction. She narrates candidly and assertively; the full-band arrangements never overpower, only offer a robust platform on which Krieger’s voice reaches new heights.
The full band brings a heightened sense of drama to the album’s arrangements, which contrasts the quieter approach of Krieger’s previous LP. There are noisy interludes, jazz-inflected discursions, impactful stops and starts, and occasional spaces for Krieger to stretch out her impressive vocal range (most prominently at the dazzling climax of album stand out “Came”).
Lead single “Never Arriving,” from which the album’s title is derived, is thrilling in its compactness. Alluding to biology, sex and death in a series of sharp phrases, the song manages to address a whole worldview in a few short lines.
“Into Eternity” introduces a new stylistic wrinkle, taking on a sprechgesang narration over an uneasy guitar motif. In a stream of consciousness delivery, Krieger presents a series of seemingly disparate vignettes – the chaos of a New York street, a memory of an interaction with a grieving ex-boyfriend, a homeless woman, a butterfly – and pulls at the common threads that connect them. Like much of the album, the song is invested in transfiguring the commonplace; examining events big and small and in doing so trying to take hold of their significance.
In Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine, Krieger invites us to a place where transfiguration is not only possible but actively happening. From this place, the beautiful and the banal and the terrible are all laid out before us. And Krieger asks us not to look away. Instead, she invites us to stare down the beautiful and terrible in the world, and to realize that sometimes the only way out is through.
