“Little Oblivions” has a bigger sound than Julien Baker’s previous albums, and it suits the songs so well. “Hardline,” the gorgeous album opener, launches with a bossy organ blare, and then explodes halfway through into squalls of percussion and guitar, all serving as a perfect setting (in a jewelry sense, of holding it all together) for what Baker’s singing about: “Until then I'll split the difference between medicine and poison/Take what I can get away with while it burns right through my stomach./I'm telling my own fortune, something I cannot escape./I can see where this is going, but I can't find the breaks.”
There are a lot of appealing and unexpected musical touches all throughout “Little Oblivions,” particularly with the percussion. Besides the stormy drums on “Hardline,” both “Relative Fiction” and “Faith Healer” have some great, crunchy percussion that’s reminiscent of Death Cab for Cutie circa “The Photo Album” and “Transatlanticism,” and the stumbling drums on “Bloodshot” bring to mind the double-drummer back-and-forth of some of Black Eyes’s tighter songs. “Ziptie” the slow and beautiful closing song, has weary, loose-handed drums, exhausted, just barely hitting in time. There’s so much consideration and craft shown in these and a hundred other choices on the album—making the sounds fit the emotional tone of the songs, the shape of the melodies. “Little Oblivions” reminds me a little of Elliott Smith’s “XO,” an artist opting for a bigger sound and filling things out in fascinating ways.
When it comes to song lyrics and poetry (and even prose), I’m a sucker for lines that stick with me or make me pause, a weird turn of phrase or a striking image. Baker’s lyrics are full of those types of lines (like the ones quoted above from “Hardline,” for example), and I think one of the most impressive aspects of what she’s done on this album is to look pretty clearly at things like relapse, regret, faith, and off-kilter relationships, and talk about those in a personal and specific way. “Faith Healer” is one of my favorite songs on the album, and partially because it contains this little section below and the way she sings it the second time around: “Faith Healer, come put your hands on me/Snake oil dealer, I’ll believe you if you make me feel something.” It’s such a good little moment of climactic emotion, right at the end of the song.
A sample of some other lines that have stayed with me: “covered in scars a canyon deep,” “I’ll wrap Orion’s belt around my neck and kick the chair out,” “Swallow the truth, push the charcoal down my throat,” “Oh, there is no glory in love—only the gore of our hearts,” “Doesn't feel too bad but it doesn't feel too good either/Just like a nicotine patch; it hardly works then it's over,” “Trying to find a reason to fight, but someone's got my head in a ziptie.”
One of the best albums of 2021 so far, can’t recommend it highly enough.