Album Review: Phoebe Bridgers - 'Punisher'
Phoebe Bridgers is ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. On Punisher, she gets both deeply dark and helplessly hopeful.
Punisher, Bridgers’ sophomore solo album, opens with “DVD Menu” -- a literal starting point in which the listener is asked to step into the journey that is the record. Where will it take you?
It then immediately transitions into one of the singles, “Garden Song.” To call it a coming of age track wouldn’t be fully accurate, and yet it’s vulnerable and raw in the way that growing up feels. “And when your skinhead neighbor goes missing,” she sings in her feathery vocal style, “I’ll plant a garden in the yard then.”
It’s apparent that Bridgers cares deeply about what she wants her music to sound like. At the age of 25, there’s a sense of sophistication and maturity that can oftentimes take years for musicians to develop. On the other single from the record, “Kyoto,” she continues to work through who she is as an artist and wrestles with what she ultimately wants to become, even if those internal conversations aren’t always blissful or easy.
“That song is about being in Japan for the first time, somewhere I’ve always wanted to go, playing my music for people who really want to hear it, and feeling...bad,” she said about the track. But if music was about being joyful and non confrontational all the time, the world wouldn't have half the musical library it does. As for the album as a whole, in which the key themes are “crying” and feeling “numb” as she told Rolling Stone a few months ago, Bridgers is pleased with her work. “If people hate it, I’m not scared,” she said.
“I can’t open my mouth and forget how to talk,” she sings on the title track, “Cause even if I could I wouldn’t know where to start, wouldn’t know when to stop.” One of Bridgers signature characteristics is the natural poignancy to her voice. There’s nothing short or sharp, rather her vocals and instrumentations are tied, connected -- like a rolling wave that wouldn’t know when to stop even if it could.
But it’s a little more complicated than that.
“I think there’s more humor in my music than people hear,” she said to Rolling Stone. “I have never wanted to be a character, and I have never wanted to hide stuff about myself. I want to normalize personhood. Songs are like therapy to me: I’m just like a normal person, going to therapy.”
A good example of this on the album is called “Halloween.” Who writes a heartbreaking song about a commercial holiday that involves love and drinking and masking yourself in the night? Phoebe Bridgers does.
Bridgers is fully original, but her influences are never far. On “Graceland Too”, the closest thing to a folk song on the album, Bridgers employs a little bluegrass banjo, tightly knit female vocal harmonies, and hits the open road.
“So she picks a direction, it’s 90 in Memphis,” she sings, “Turns up the music so thoughts don’t intrude. Predictably winds up thinking of Elvis. And wonders if he believed songs could come true. I’m asking for it if they do, Doesn’t know what she wants or what she’s gonna do. A rebel without a clue.”
The lyrical reference to Tom Petty is nestled in there, and Bridgers, a native of Pasadena, is perhaps nodding to the cohort of Laurel Canyon/Southern Californian greats that came before her.
“We hate Tears In Heaven, but it’s sad that his baby died,” she references further on “Moon Song,” “We fought about John Lennon, till I cried, then went to bed upset.”
There’s a fine line between specificity and abstractness when it comes to lyrical writing, and Bridgers dances along that line in ways similar to Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell. Punisher is brilliant, but I think her Blood on the Tracks or Blue is still on the horizon.
“Either way we’re not alone, I’ll find a new place to be from,” she sings on “I Know The End,” the final track on the album. There’s a buildup of sound, like she’s pulling onto a highway and slowly placing more pressure on the gas pedal until she ends up flying. There’s a scream at the end, presumably Bridgers, letting it all out. She gives one last chuckle of sorts and the album is done -- that new place is next.
Words by Allison Rapp