- Shoegaze? Dream pop? Baroque? Holter's latest album is all of these at once, and utterly singular.
- When New Zealand mountaineer and explorer Sir Edmund Hillary said, "It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves," he could have been describing the thematic trajectory of Julia Holter's music. Her 2013 album Loud City Song captured the bliss and anxiety of living in modern cities, then two years later, Have You In My Wilderness saw her abandon the city for a more naturalistic state of mind (leading to lyrics like "City shoes found ways down green, fertile valleys''). More recently, she's embarked on inner quests that seem to have brought about a state of stillness. Where 2018's Aviary was a defiant commitment to continue showing love in the face of a dehumanising future, her latest album, Something In The Room She Moves, focuses on what she described to The Quietus as "Love in the present, love that is real. Love that isn't going to happen in the future and is not reflected from the past." Major events, like the pandemic and the birth of her daughter, have tamed the sense of longing that prevailed earlier in her career. Even still, this album is just as expansive, sometimes even more so.
The sprawling, luminous chamber pop on Something In The Room She Moves employs mantras and childlike bliss as to celebrate the glory of the present moment. The album's wide-open soundscapes were inspired by her daughter's favourite film, the Studio Ghibli production Ponyo, where a boy takes a goldfish on a forbidden excursion to see the surface world. In her appreciation for the everyday subtleties of life, Holter embraces the world exactly as it is on Something In The Room She Moves. Opener "Sun Girl" captures this best. Chimes, woodwinds that sound like birdsong and light percussive elements induce an intoxicating tranquillity. "Placing sudden daylight on me / Place me, drag me / Move me, sun girl," she repeats in the cadence of a nursery rhyme, completely surrendering to her surroundings. Playful and content, you can imagine her dawdling over the window sill and singing to the garden.
Holter's background as an avant-garde composer and her admitted inspiration from fellow chamber pop savant Joanna Newsom shine through on the dazzling "These Morning." The brass section stretches and yawns while keys flutter tentatively like morning dew. Another mantra anchors the song: "Just like me / Just like me / Just like me," she repeats. She skips along with an infectious amount of self-comfort, inadvertently encouraging the listener to ease into their own body as it all unfurls.
The body—and finding a home in it—is a core tenet on Something In The Room She Moves. The title track opens with movement-focused imagery (running, dance and stamina) over brisk chords, before suddenly blooming into an amalgam of lush instrumentation. Both the woodwind and vibrato in her delivery shimmy and wobble like someone with eyes closed during interpretative dance: "When I'm in the furniture, I believe what I can / What I see could be so nice / What I see could be so lifelike." She commits herself to uncontaminated perception, blurring the borders between her physical body and her surroundings. Elsewhere, beneath the shimmery veil and stirring drums of "Evening Mood" lay an ultrasound heartbeat, heavily filtered and sent through a phaser which makes it sound like the song in itself is taking place inside of a sentient being.
Dusk descends at the album's halfway point, with dimly lit, sleepier cuts that add an edge of mystery. "Meyou" is a meditative voyage from separation to oneness. It's a hymnal lullaby delivered acapella, where the words "me" and "you" are sung in call and response, eventually blurring until there's no telling where one voice ends and another begins. On "Ocean," Tashi Wada paints a body of water from whirring synth lines that glide upwards tidally, bringing Holter's desire to make "everything feel very liquid" into reality. The results are astoundingly beautiful, like a field recording taken from some uncharted corner of the earth. Elsewhere, the climax at the end of the ominous "Talking To The Whisper" beggars belief, it's a traffic jam of cascading keys, sporadic drumming, serpentine brass and more, an explosion of chaotic sound to conclude one of her best songs ever.
As transportative as Something In The Room She Moves is, the album takes place from within. On the title track she commands the morning to wake her, while on "Spinning" she speaks of "[believing] in night that breathes alone," it's all feeling and perception-oriented music that humanises Holter's surroundings until the borders between her and them disappear. Alongside the heaven-facing instrumentation, her objective reporting of what she feels and witnesses in each moment makes the earthly and mundane unearthly. With Something In The Room She Moves, Holter continues her streak of evoking wonder in everything she touches. It's a beautiful display of what happens when someone conquers themselves enough to allow their adult consciousness to nourish their childlike wonder. In its minimal longing and maximal instrumentation, it beckons for less while exuding more than we could've ever hoped for from her.
Tracklist01. Sun Girl
02. These Morning
03. Something In The Room She Moves
04. Materia
05. Meyou
06. Spinning
07. Ocean
08. Evening Mood
09. Talking To The Whisper
10. Who Brings Me