Carrying the trend of softer, comfort music with Mitski, a singer/songwriter I had no previous knowledge of but my wife loved listening to on our local radio station. She got me last year’s The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We, and over the last few days I’ve been returning to it, finding comfort in its hushed whispers and delicate melodies. I won’t heap the accolades others have; I have minor quibbles here and there, particularly with the monotony of some tracks, but I was never looking for grandiose ambitions and reinventing the wheel here. I want music that wraps me in a cozy blanket and keeps me feeling okay with myself when I need it, and there are times when that can only happen with an album like this.

In a way, “Bug Like An Angel” is the prefect opener. The chord structure that grounds Mitski’s vocal melody carry through a lot of the album, and work to emphasize the different genres that come to play throughout The Land Is Inhospitable... Despite the many, many instances of “ooh, ooh-ooh-oohs” that on every track the songs are very story-driven and personal. As someone who typically eschews lyrics for strong music, I find the opposite happening here, and lines like “As I got older, I learned I’m a drinker / Sometimes, a drink feels like family” and “Did you go and make promises you can’t keep? / Well, when you ya break them, they break you right back” are not only striking, but piercing. The soft, alternative folk continues on the slightly forgettable “Buffalo Replaced” with a slight upward tick on “Heaven” owing to the strong song arrangement, bringing strings and an Appalachian gospel/country feel to surround Mitski’s vocals, which are strong but tend to lean on the same melodic lines just a bit too much.

Where things really pick up for me is on “I Don’t Like My Mind” – it has a very strong hook to open the song, and lyrically it’s the most soul revealing, as Mitski talks about how the emptiness of a quiet room can sound like judgement about all your fears and inadequacies. I genuinely love it, and the music reflects a more energetic, almost torch quality to the song (you can hear her talk about the song here, and she acknowledges the sameness in her vocal delivery as well). That sense of energy is ramped up further on “The Deal” as the somber, fractured poetry of her words slowly get drowned out by a tumultuous drumming that fades into crush the track’s ending. Completing the triptych of fantastic songs is “When Memories Snow” – not only is the lyrical content on point (a lot of The Land Is Inhospitable… concerns itself with memories and ruminations and how they play into your life) – but the stark piano and introduction of an actual drum beat – the first on the album – make this brief minute and a half song incredibly powerful. Again the orchestration pushes it even further, like George Martin working in an abandoned high school with the leftover instruments of a junior band.

The rest of The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We continues on a trajectory similar to the first couple of songs: slow, quiet meditations that embody aspects of folk, gospel, and old-fashioned torch songs. At 11 songs and 32 minutes it passes by rather quickly, which is good – on the surface there isn’t a whole lot of variation to the songs, and so you get a very focused album that doesn’t overstay its welcome or drag into monotony. Similar to the Chelsea Wolfe album, I don’t know that I’ll explore much deeper into Mitski’s catalog – apparently her earlier work is different, a little more rock and electronic oriented – but I am glad to have this in my collection to satisfy a very particular need. If she decides to continue in this vein, we’ll see what happens.^*

* Turns out I kept listening to this throughout the day, and it just continued to grow and grow on me. There are small, amazing nuances underneath each song, and huge credit to Mitski and her musical partner in crime Patrick Hyland – they crafted a masterful album that snuck up on me in a way I never suspected.