Miss America, the centrepiece of Jennifer Walton\u2019s 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: \u201cCattle farm and broke down shack \/ Strip-mall, drug deal, panic attacks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jennifer Walton, Daughters. Photograph: Local Action<\/p>\n
Walton\u2019s gentle vocals are deadpan, with the record\u2019s 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 \u2013 like Olga Tokarczuk\u2019s Drive Your Plow lit with flickers of warped cello. Tense, quiet verses with echoing, plucked guitar segue into grand choruses, Walton\u2019s voice digitally manipulated into something omniscient and sinister.<\/p>\n
Listeners might already be familiar with Walton as an electronic producer, DJ and contributor to bands such as Caroline. Daughters\u2019 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<\/a>, feel both gnarly and spiritual, and Walton\u2019s morbid, magical thinking peaks on highlight Lambs, which briefly becomes a swirling jig. \u201cMay your life never end in death,\u201d she bargains, with heart-aching gallows humour.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Miss America, the centrepiece of Jennifer Walton\u2019s stylish, painful debut record, sits us down in a hotel room…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":248254,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[88,216],"class_list":{"0":"post-248253","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248253\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}