As half of the brother-sister act The Fiery Furnaces — presently on hiatus — Eleanor Friedberger indulges some of her artier and more experimental, unpredictable impulses. As a solo artist, she's the epitome of subtle, un-showy cool. Friedberger's first solo record, 2011's Last Summer, was a marvelous exercise in nostalgia; the dryly sweet musical equivalent of a 35-year-old Polaroid. On Personal Record, out June 4, her palette expands to include a wider array of themes and perspectives, while she maintains a minimalist-cool sound that's sweet, simple and timeless. Friedberger wrote Personal Record with singer-songwriter John Wesley Harding, who knows a little something about smart love songs of every stripe.
As a vocalist, Friedberger's dryly flat affect has a slight tremble to it, with appealing plainspokenness to match arrangements like the one in "When I Knew," in which even the handclaps are muted. There's a lot of air in the sweet ballad "Echo or Encore" and elsewhere; she keeps enough spareness in these songs that when she switches up the formula — as in the lush choruses of "She's a Mirror," the bouncy strum of "Stare at the Sun" or the flashes of distortion in "Tomorrow Tomorrow" — the joys and surprises hit that much harder.
- Stephen Thompson, NPR Music
Track List:
01. I Don't Want to Bother You
02. When I Knew
03. I'll Never Be Happy Again
04. Stare at the Sun
05. Echo or Encore
06. My Own World
07. Tomorrow Tomorrow
08. You'll Never Know Me
09. I Am the Past
10. She's a Mirror
11. Other Boys
12. Singing Time