Miss America, the centrepiece of Jennifer Walton’s stylish, painful debut record, sits us down in a hotel room near JFK airport, watching on as Walton learns that her father has been diagnosed with cancer. The Sunderland-born musician had been touring the US for the first time, drumming with indie band Kero Kero Bonito, and now grief greys everything out. Faltering piano and hushed strings accompany gothic dispatches from the tour van: “Cattle farm and broke down shack / Strip-mall, drug deal, panic attacks.”
Walton’s gentle vocals are deadpan, with the record’s tension brought by her penmanship (encompassing fiction, folksy sayings and blunt diary entries) and her sharp, surprising maximalism. Few songs this year have stronger novelistic flair than Shelly, which witnesses the killing of a deer and spirals into a petrol-laden reckoning – like Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow lit with flickers of warped cello. Tense, quiet verses with echoing, plucked guitar segue into grand choruses, Walton’s voice digitally manipulated into something omniscient and sinister.
Listeners might already be familiar with Walton as an electronic producer, DJ and contributor to bands such as Caroline. Daughters’ musical twists draw on this varied career. Opener Sometimes bursts with fanfare, like a string band caught by surprise, while Born Again Backwards radically ups the BPM with a punishing, beautiful, looping drum fill. Dense walls of sound, expertly mixed by longtime collaborator Aya, feel both gnarly and spiritual, and Walton’s morbid, magical thinking peaks on highlight Lambs, which briefly becomes a swirling jig. “May your life never end in death,” she bargains, with heart-aching gallows humour.
