Punisher - Phoebe Bridgers [Album Review]
After a long haul touring with side projects Better Oblivion Community and boygenius, this summer Phoebe Bridgers gave us Punisher, her long-awaited second solo album. Further refining what caught the attention of the indie world in her 2017 debut LP Stranger in the Alps, there are many endearing things about Bridgers’ songwriting that stand out on Punisher: the heavy-handed way she references what she loves, the macabre themes she entertains with wry observation, the existential questions laced with laconic irony that permeate her work as a whole. Murdering and burying a dead neo-Nazi her crush’s backyard? Psychosexual anxiety dreams? That’s just off the first (vocal) track on the album, and it’s exactly the unconventional Phoebe Bridgers™ flair that established her footing at the beginning of an already prolific career.
Punisher as a whole, however, witnesses Bridgers’ graduation from past trauma as she turns to face the skeletons in her own closet, the biggest of which might be herself. We know slaying our demons paves the way to personal growth, but here Bridgers shies away from any destination, languishing instead in liminality. Elements like the watery guitars on "Garden Song" and halo-like doubling of her voice on the title track “Punisher” give off the feeling of being submerged underwater, though not too uncomfortably—more like floating in a tepid bath than drowning in an unforgiving ocean. Meanwhile, she wields contradiction like a sword in “Kyoto,” pitting joyful horns against her signature tragic humor in lines like, “I wanna kill you / if you don’t beat me to it,”—a relatable way of battling with empathy for someone who has hurt you. Bridgers’ isn’t above barefaced vulnerability either. In “Chinese Satellite” she sings, “But you know I'd stand on the corner / embarrassed with a picket sign / if it meant I would see you when I die,” wanting so much to believe in something beyond the finality of our collective existence. At first, I admired Bridgers for the way she conveys the idea of aloneness without loneliness, but now I see her real strength is in how she captures her own absence. She says it outright in “ICU”: “I get this feeling / whenever I feel good / it'll be the last time.” The walls she once built to protect have now reduced her to a ghost, watching the movie of her life play on without her.
There is something singular about this album opening with an instrumental called “DVD Menu,” and finishing with a track called “I Know The End.” The former sets the stage like a reverie, letting Bridgers haunt the rest of it. A flâneuse in her own right, she watches chemtrails with her brother in a suburban Goodwill parking lot, trips on MDMA and walks to a store without the intention of buying anything. She stares at the sky and feels nothing, waits around for the next time her lover wants her. She spends her time pretending to be herself and then asks who would do such a thing. In “Graceland Too,” she “doesn't know what she wants or what she's gonna do.” By the time she makes it to the last song, she’s lying around, getting up and lying back down, watching the sun set on a relationship before the inevitable end takes hold. A cacophony of explosive instrumentation, screaming and what could be the first breath of life or a last death rattle has Bridgers gasping for air before the record cuts. “I have everything I wanted,” she sings at the beginning of the album, almost in lament. Now, at the end of Punisher, the meaning is in where she decides to go from here.
Punisher as a whole, however, witnesses Bridgers’ graduation from past trauma as she turns to face the skeletons in her own closet, the biggest of which might be herself. We know slaying our demons paves the way to personal growth, but here Bridgers shies away from any destination, languishing instead in liminality. Elements like the watery guitars on "Garden Song" and halo-like doubling of her voice on the title track “Punisher” give off the feeling of being submerged underwater, though not too uncomfortably—more like floating in a tepid bath than drowning in an unforgiving ocean. Meanwhile, she wields contradiction like a sword in “Kyoto,” pitting joyful horns against her signature tragic humor in lines like, “I wanna kill you / if you don’t beat me to it,”—a relatable way of battling with empathy for someone who has hurt you. Bridgers’ isn’t above barefaced vulnerability either. In “Chinese Satellite” she sings, “But you know I'd stand on the corner / embarrassed with a picket sign / if it meant I would see you when I die,” wanting so much to believe in something beyond the finality of our collective existence. At first, I admired Bridgers for the way she conveys the idea of aloneness without loneliness, but now I see her real strength is in how she captures her own absence. She says it outright in “ICU”: “I get this feeling / whenever I feel good / it'll be the last time.” The walls she once built to protect have now reduced her to a ghost, watching the movie of her life play on without her.
There is something singular about this album opening with an instrumental called “DVD Menu,” and finishing with a track called “I Know The End.” The former sets the stage like a reverie, letting Bridgers haunt the rest of it. A flâneuse in her own right, she watches chemtrails with her brother in a suburban Goodwill parking lot, trips on MDMA and walks to a store without the intention of buying anything. She stares at the sky and feels nothing, waits around for the next time her lover wants her. She spends her time pretending to be herself and then asks who would do such a thing. In “Graceland Too,” she “doesn't know what she wants or what she's gonna do.” By the time she makes it to the last song, she’s lying around, getting up and lying back down, watching the sun set on a relationship before the inevitable end takes hold. A cacophony of explosive instrumentation, screaming and what could be the first breath of life or a last death rattle has Bridgers gasping for air before the record cuts. “I have everything I wanted,” she sings at the beginning of the album, almost in lament. Now, at the end of Punisher, the meaning is in where she decides to go from here.