Ivy Mensah — Cold Open
The microphone is a detail the record will not let you forget, because you can hear the room change whenever she moves in it.
On three tracks that is the entire achievement. On two others it is the reason you cannot make out the words.
The constraint is real rather than a story told afterwards. Cold Open was recorded in a room above a shop over eleven days in February with one microphone and no overdubs, and you can hear the room on every track: a slight boxiness at the low end, a reverb tail that is the actual space rather than a plate, and at least twice something happening outside that nobody stopped for.
When it works, it works because the limitation forces a decision. `Held Note` is one voice and one guitar and could not survive being arranged; the version here is the only version there could be, and it is the best thing on the record by a distance. `Fen` does something similar with less material and gets further.
When it does not work, the limitation is doing the deciding instead of her. Four of these eleven tracks are songs that needed a second idea and did not get one, and the reason they did not get one is not artistic — it is that there were eleven days. "Sparse" and "unfinished" produce very similar waveforms and quite different records, and Cold Open is both, alternately, in a sequence that does nothing to separate them.
The voice is the thing. It is unfussy in a way that takes most singers a decade, it does not decorate, and on the two occasions it goes somewhere unexpected the record briefly becomes something else entirely.
The good half is the best debut anyone has made here this year, and the other half is the reason it is a debut.
Ines Ravelo
Member discussion