Album of the Week: Half Waif – The Caretaker

best albums of 2020 Half Waif

Synth-pop, after so many years, can be a troubling and difficult space in which to find something new to explore. No matter the post-modern ambitions of artists seeking to subvert, or even remain consistent, with each release, without a nuanced and progressive approach they often fall short. This is anything but the case for The Caretaker, Nandi Rose’s fourth full-length foray into her spiraling world of delicate electronic pop as Half Waif. It’s nothing short of pure, intimate majesty.

Through a wave of modulated vintage synths, Rose’s sonorous voice, flirting with baritones, cuts through staggered keys and elongated hums on the opening track “Cloud’s Rest.” Lyrically, themes of self-actualization amid sorrow come across through lines such as, “Going nowhere fast now/ I’ve been running uphill calm and focused/dragging my hips in the wind/swollen with promise.” Yet she counters that with an uproarious bellow of “frustrated in my body.” It’s a careful interplay between Rose’s presence as an artist and a composition seated below her that creates an evocative texture.

A similar texture and care in interplay is woven throughout the album. “Siren” features a throbbing rhythm alternating between each speaker channel, working its arpeggiated keys into a hazy circle of lighter and brighter rings around the listener. Rose adds increasingly intimate and complex instrumentation, including a beautiful, machine-like percussive sample. It’s a rotary of hazy beauty.

There are more traditional structures that play with pop affectation, like the single “Ordinary Talk,” structured like a synth pop ballad, but with greater panache and tact. Its attention to detail helps separate it easily from mainstream radio fare. What elevates it is the efficiency in which Rose describes the weight and joy of a plain life among the utter richness of the soundscape. It’s an ode to normalcy, disguised with a soaring approach. Creating a message like this is something that’s certainly welcome in pop music, the elimination of solipsistic gazing and embrace of vulnerability and truth.

This reverence for normalcy reveals itself throughout the album in powerful ways, like “In August” where, against a hushed piano and lazy synth, Rose sings: “In august if I’m honest/ we were on each others teeth/ than autumn came with all it’s fate I wondered how you’d be/ oh I have lost your friendship what does that say about me?” There is powerful regret, a condemnation of a relationship that has fallen from intimacy to ruin, and like so many other powerful works, questions and interrogates this throughout. The soundscape that guides this journey is rendered with awe, a rich flute sliding under Rose’s guiding voice stretched thin like an emissary of regret against a haunting drum machine.

There’s something to be said about the sonic direction Half Waif takes on this album. While an over-ear set of headphones isn’t required, it should be advised, as tracks like “Halogen 2” bounce playfully alternating rhythms and a dynamism that sits on a cusp of betraying its artful integrity with such a rich and commercialized feel. That dynamism applies easily to “Blinking Light” where the subtlest hint of twang here evokes a folk space in which Rose fully explores vocally the intent and progression of folk as an ode to everyday life. Yet, this is no mere imitation—there’s a simple chord progression in the second half where the volume reaches a full wave to counter Rose’s own escalation. It ends with a blowing sound, like a candle being snuffed out.

One wonders whether the piano-drive “Brace” is being played in an empty room in the dark, a track that allows Rose to explore another aspect of the mundane with a contrasting flourish of haunting, delicate minimalism. This approach transitions into the next track, “Generation,” as well, yet it remains distant, more melancholy yet stoic, thanks to the addition of a bowed bass that underpins the track in a monumental sense.

The last three tracks are concerned with a more controlled and slightly more restrained tempo, though this isn’t to say that the album’s closer doesn’t carry a momentum that hints at a sinister relief. “Window Place”‘s main melody features accompanying accents on Rose’s vocals that shift in half steps with ease but sound dark and ominous. This is only to provide relief through the second half of the track that resonates with a sharp brightness, like its own lyrics which remain focused on the nature of seasons, this album finishes with a sense that it has reached the end of one cycle and the beginning of another.

The Caretaker is a sonic edifice of ambitious and exquisitely intimate art pop. With carefully crafted melodies, deeply powerful and poetic lyrics, and confidence in ensuring that each track does not needlessly overstay its welcome, this is Rose’s strongest effort to date. Its purpose is not just in its rich and layered soundscapes, but also in the audacity to structure the album with the sense of a narrative, to give heart, meaning and denouement to what could have been something so much less, but is instead so much more.


Label: Anti-
Year: 2020


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