Unlike any other.
Julia Holter opens her latest album, Materia, with “The Laugh Is In The Eyes.” Immediately grabbing attention with very intentional pronunciation, it may seem at first as if the vocals are interrupting the instrumental flow, but instead it simply works. Halfway through the song, Holter introduces a frankly insane flute solo, which she uses as a bridge between the disjointed front half and the smooth, melodic tone of the second half, a method that acts as a through-line for the rest of the album. The flute, which Holter mentions by name, decorates the remainder of the song in a beautiful, light manner, creating a sense of peace and inviting the rest of the album to the stage.
The following song, “My Lost One,” flows like a river after a rainfall. Incredibly creative production, complete with all sorts of literal bells and whistles, excites the song and compliments the bright and nearly–but not quite–whiny vocals. Its outro shines as the best part of an already great song, as Holter repeats “I leave my dove, my lost one,” over and over, all while evading unnecessary repetition. Each reiteration of the line feels both earned and necessary to fill out the song and wave goodbye.
Track four, “Materia 2,” lulls listeners into a deep and immediate sense of peacefulness. Its ethereal worldbuilding is immaculate and all-encompassing. The trend is continued with “My Twin.” The ten-minute song starts as what can best be described as a lullaby for adults, before it melts into an eerier tone. Lyrics synthetically blend into one another during the second section of the song, reutilizing the repetition first introduced in “My Lost One” to create an inescapable unease. Every 250 seconds or so, an instrumental interlude transitions the song into a new hemisphere of sound, which somehow makes it difficult to feel drawn out despite its ten-minute run time. The song closes with a music box melody that perfectly ties into the front end’s lullaby, bookending the familial song with notes from childhood.
The final song, “Materia 3,” wraps up the album with the swoosh of a pen and the melancholy of a piano. Holter, who wrote the tune singlehandedly, ponders what love does to memory and if the odyssey of recollection is powerfully poetic or simply painful. “Memory mistaken for what’s here right now” encompasses the entire being of the album in a sentence. The placement of the song as last on the tracklist was a stroke of genius, as it is the key to unlocking what the entire project is getting at. Suddenly, all of the words that blend into one another and the melodies that both frighten and relieve listeners just make sense.
Julia Holter’s Materia can be polarizing at first, perhaps if not listened to with an open mind. It defies genres and emotions with an ease that can bring listeners the opposite. Yet, through the mist, it is attractively self-assured. Listeners are brought into the belly of the beast with “The Laugh Is In The Eyes,” and by the time the seventh track rolls around, they’re more than happy to be there.
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