Comes on Robin’s Egg Blue Vinyl + Digital Download
The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We is the seventh studio album by American singer-songwriter Mitski, released on September 15, 2023.
Here, the alchemical imagination that turns cumuli into sierras meets fireflies that hurtle like cars and freight trains that clomp like wild cattle. Mitski conjures scenes of stark and spectral beauty, backed by sweeping orchestral arrangements written by Drew Erickson, the man behind the Old Hollywood grandeur of Father John Misty’s Chloë and the Next 20st Century and the cosmic bloom of Weyes Blood’s And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow. Gone is the claustrophobic synth-pop that landed Mitski her first Billboard hit, the tense sound of the big city; now the blinding lights of the stage seem to appear only as a memory. The result is a warmer, quieter, and more organic-sounding record that foregrounds her evocative songwriting. For the first time in a while, she sounds like she has space to breathe.
As always with Mitski’s albums, loneliness is an inescapable feature of the geography: “It’s just witness-less me,” she sings to empty space on “The Frost,” realizing that she’s alone in her grief. Her steely, vigilant stance—so prevalent on 2018’s Be the Cowboy and Laurel Hell—has softened, the starch dissolving from her personality. So even when connection seems impossible, she reaches for company. She sends love to a benevolent moon, hoping it will pass on the sentiment after she fades to dust. She pours herself another glass, because “sometimes a drink feels like family”—and over solitary, minimal guitar strums, a chorus of voices swell up behind her like a cruel hallucination: “FAMILY.”...source, www.pitchfork.com
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