Beautiful instrumentation dulled by monotony. 

Starlit Alchemy is incredibly open and honest. Rachael Yamagata pours her heart onto each track, with each song evoking the sensation of reading someone else’s diary, so eerily that listeners almost feel intrusive. 

The issue is that being so personal, the album lacks relatability. Moreover, every song on the album sounds incredibly similar to the next one. It’s as if Yamagata made one song and formulaically recreated it 10 times over, adding slightly different lyrics and themes each time. The album is incredibly cohesive. But it’s cohesive in the way a completely monochromatic outfit is: it fits everything paired with it, but it’s bland. It’s safe, but adding a little bit of something extra would take it to the next level. The vocals are steady and stable, but they’re so consistent that no excitement is brought with them. 

Starlit Alchemy does nothing to surprise its listeners. Every decision made within each song could’ve been predicted the second it started. 

Opening with “Backwards,” listeners are thrown into Yamagata’s beautiful world. Her vocals are strong and her lyrics are self assured, creating an impressive ballad. If the album kept this pace, with a little differentiation, Starlit Alchemy would’ve been a singer-songwriter powerhouse of an album. This falters by the very next song on the track list, “Birds.” While not a bad song, it is completely unremarkable. If listeners go into the album seeking weak Fiona Apple imitations, they’ll find exactly what they were looking for. If they came looking for something innovative and captivating, their search will have to continue on elsewhere. 

Every song following the first two fits the same pattern exactly. Yamagata finds a niche that compliments one aspect of her songwriting and then throws it away in the next song. Track three, “Carnival,” does an amazing job of showcasing Yamagata’s beautiful vocals. But then track four, “Heaven Help,” is agonizingly slow, to the point of being unintelligible. Yamagata takes so much time to say so little that any depth that may have been present in the lyrics is disregarded by the production. 

“Blue Jay,” track 7, exemplifies this pattern all within the same song. It starts off beautifully, with harmonious piano opening up the track. Unfortunately, then the vocals come in, weaker than they are on the rest of the album. Worse than that, the lyrics being sung, rather than being painfully heartbreaking, only succeed in being painfully uninteresting. 

“Somebody Like Me,” is the Starlit Alchemy silver lining. Yamagata uses string instruments in a very unique way that pays off within the song and introduces a depth to her voice that was never previously explored. Its production is creative, exciting and brings something new to the table which, up until this point, had been filled solely with the same bland choices over and over again. 

Starlit Alchemy has its moments of intense beauty and soulfulness, but they’re few and far between.