Collapsed in Sunbeams: An Arlo Parks Album Review

 
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Arlo Parks knows her way around a guitar. The London-based singer-songwriter’s debut album, ‘Collapsed in Sunbeams’, out January 29, contains the kind of masterful storytelling that, while seeming occasionally of the carefully-curated Tumblr blog variety, proves itself to be facile at articulating the complicated personal relationships that define one’s young adult years. While listening to the album for the first time, I was reminded of Hannah Horvath, Lena Dunham’s love-to-hate-watch character from ‘Girls,’ the show that invented marketable millennial relatability and, love it or hate it, pioneered a young female (albeit white and privileged) perspective. In the show’s pilot, Hannah eagerly tells her parents, while attempting to convince them to lend her yet more money to support her ambitions of becoming a professional writer, “I think that I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice. Of a generation.” 

This obsession with personal expression, brought on by a generation of kids who grew up on the internet, can at times be smothering; a call to “speak your truth,” when, honestly, at age 20, you haven’t experienced that much. However, I don’t want to conflate a lack of experience with a lack of intensity, and this is exactly what Arlo Parks accomplishes so well. She doesn’t trivialize the realities of the teen experience, instead weaving poetic narratives that feel at once arresting and comforting, reaching universality through the careful contemplation of her own memories. As it turns out, people respond to that specificity. Her lyrics are carefully chosen, mild enough to feel comfortable within a wider audience of listeners, but surprisingly cutting in their delivery. While each song reads like a self-contained chapter within a wider collection of journal entries, there is certainly connective tissue between them.

 Album opener ‘Collapsed in Sunbeams’ sets the album’s meditative tone, itself not even a song but rather a minute-long spoken word poem, where Parks gently nudges a lover, “We're all learning to trust our bodies/Making peace with our own distortions/You shouldn't be afraid to cry in front of me in moments,” over a simple guitar riff. These distortions reveal themselves in the album’s remaining eleven tracks, entwining different narrative standpoints and discussing themes from a friend’s crippling depression to Parks’ own relationship anxieties and reflections on her sexuality, returning to these topics so frequently as to feel occasionally like playing Gen Z bingo. Her lyrical bent has lent Parks the polarizing label “voice of a generation,” and while Parks herself evades this label, I think its prevalence stems from something Parks mentioned in an interview with The Independent, claiming that, of her own music, “I think if you don’t feel a bit scared when you’re putting stuff out, it’s not close to the bone enough.” 

I’d go a step further and say that “voice of a generation” in and of itself isn’t even necessarily an issue, just a compliment about compelling, self-aware lyricists that at times can feel a bit loaded. However, I understand that once an audience has been created, then creating with that audience in mind can crush you. That’s the curse of the second album, and one Parks will have to work through as her star inevitably grows. Nevertheless, ‘Collapsed in Sunbeams’ seems like an instant classic, and an album primarily concerned with constructing moods that promote reassurance. To this end, the instrumentation on the album is simple, and the lyrics occasionally repetitive enough to feel monotonous. For example, on ‘Hope,’ the album’s fourth track, Parks sings, “You’re not alone like you think you are/We all have scars, I know it’s hard,” but the positive messages of universality and hopeful “we’re all in this together”-isms feel forced and corny when re-worded in ‘Black Dog’ as “Some of these folks wanna make you cry/But you gotta trust how you feel inside/And shine.” 

However, occasional Pinterest quotes aside, the album’s surprising success is found in its breezy experimentation, incorporating the bedroom-pop and indie-rock that form its foundation with trip-hop beats, folksy instrumentation, and vocals that undoubtedly reflect the influence of the South London Jazz scene that is definitely having a moment. It’s a collection of reference points as diverse as London itself, and when integrated seamlessly into the album, create an uninhibited and fresh sound that speaks to the sophistication of Parks’ own musical taste. When serving as the backdrop for Parks’ striking lyrics, the result is infectious. 

It’s those lyrics that remain the crux of the album. Like on ‘Caroline,’ where Parks witnesses a couple’s public fight, observing that “shards of glass live in this feeling,” or when she delivers the sickest burn to any indie kid you fell for that ruined your life, singing “You quote Thom Yorke and lean in for a quick kiss/But still you just won't admit that you like me.” There is a reassurance in realizing that these lyrics work so well because they are plucked from actual experience. These aren’t songs that can be created in Hollywood where forty-year-old songwriters masquerade as teens in order to emulate an experience they haven’t personally felt in twenty-five years.

 What I love about Arlo Parks’ music is that she would be making it regardless of whether people were listening. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good that they are, but Parks creates for herself. The subjects of her stories aren’t imaginary, they’re very much real, and her diaristic tendencies recall – in a confessional tone, not sonic similarities – one very famous singer-songwriter who initially made waves for writing about her exes, before people realized she can actually just write a damn good song (fine, it’s Taylor Swift). Instead of occupying the tired seat of the girl next door, Arlo Parks is more like the cool girl observing at the back of the class, writing poems in her notebook. At the rate she’s going, I’m sure those poems will earn her a Grammy. 

You can listen to ‘Collapsed in Sunbeams,’ out January 29 on Transgressive Records, on Spotify here.

Watch Arlo Parks’ music video for ‘Black Dog’ here.

Watch Arlo Parks’ music video for ‘Eugene’ here .

Watch Arlo Parks’ NPR Tiny Desk concert here.

And you can keep up with Arlo Parks on Instagram and Twitter.

 
Julianna Ritzubatch 4