Cassandra Jenkins isn’t much of a rock-‘n’-roll singer. “Clams Casino,” the second track on the Brooklyn singer-songwriter’s third studio album, My Light, My Destroyer, is the zippiest rocker she’s penned to date, but her whispercore vocals—so pitch-perfect on the album’s opener, the hazy morning reverie that is “Devotion”—clash with the song’s jagged electric guitars and chugging rhythm. Fortunately, this is an anomaly on an album in which Jenkins’s voice typically melts seamlessly into the subtle, vast sonic tapestry.
Working with a large ensemble of collaborators, Jenkins explores a broader range of genres and moods on My Light, My Destroyer than she ever has before. Most of the musical elements feel fairly familiar—folksy strumming, Pixies-ish guitar riffs, jazzy saxophone—but when they’re woven together with field recordings and found sounds, something new, almost otherworldly begins to emerge. It’s a perfect backdrop for a set of songs that finds Jenkins plumbing the mundane and even dreary aspects of life only to uncover something utterly sublime.
The drama of the wordless vocal motifs on “Delphinium Blue” may initially seem at odds with lyrics about the humdrum business of working at a flower shop. Upending convention with a spoken-word chorus, Jenkins coldly intones, “Chin up/Stay on task/Wash the windows/Count the cash.” Amid the drudgery, though, she stumbles upon feelings of transcendence: “All around me the narcissus bloom/I picture the sun hitting you/The air is filled/With their perfume.”
On “Aurora, IL,” Jenkins finds herself between tour dates in the titular city with nothing to do: “How long can I stare at the ceiling/Before it kills me?” Once again, boredom leads to insight after she sees a local news report about William Shatner’s 2021 trip to space aboard Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space shuttle, spurring her to ponder the “thin line between us and nothingness” as she watches planes in the sky “ripping space-time.” Jenkins’s secular spiritualism—or, at least, her affinity for astrophysics—crystallizes with two bookend sound collages: “Shatner’s Theme,” which sounds like the tuning of a cosmic radio dial, and “Betelgeuse,” wherein Jenkins and her mother have an awed exchange about celestial bodies over spacey piano and brass.
On “Petco,” Jenkins’s quest for meaning takes a near comical turn when she ponders, “I wander through the pet store/Asking, ‘What is my true nature?’” But perhaps even aspiring to a seemingly distant escape from this earthly mire can be its own reward. Indeed, the album’s penultimate track, “Only One,” finds the singer once again facing another repetitive day in a static, mechanistic world and going through the usual motions like a “stick figure Sisyphus,” her circumstances compounded by seemingly recent heartbreak.
Yet while its lyrics convey strife, the song’s cool, confident strut and sleek melodicism are blissful and soothing. With a unique pop alchemy, carefully balancing world-weariness and euphoria, “Only One” is Jenkins’s own “Dancing in the Dark.” And it perfectly exemplifies My Light, My Destroyer’s thesis that beauty can be found anywhere if you’re willing to look for it.
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