Just more than halfway through her twenties, Ally Evenson has a couple questions for whoever’s in charge: “Am I who I’m growing into? Will I be more than just a face? Will I be more if I’m erased?” On the opening track of her debut album, BLUE SUPER LOVE, she hovers in a weightless void of shimmering THX Deep Notes, weighing the paths before her: to have “fun in hell or shitty heaven.” Evenson chooses violence. Right before its two-minute mark, “Shitty Heaven” breaks into an unexpected, grimy drum ’n’ bass vamp—during which, in the accompanying visual, the Detroit singer-songwriter contemplates a gushing head wound and slips on a pair of sunglasses. Then—wham—she’s struck by a new rush of noise with all the force and pressure of an underwater vacuum implosion or especially violent Turnstile show. By dramatically changing the song’s momentum twice in just a few minutes, Evenson sets the album’s mood as a house with the gas left on, liable to combust at the strike of a match.
While Evenson’s earlier Bandcamp releases fit squarely in the mold of downcast indie rock, BLUE SUPER LOVE sets itself apart by leaning hard into smeared textures—motion blur, the buzz of a vocoder, the grain of a digital camera—and sharp edges. The melody on “Where Are You Going?”, one of the record’s sweetest, wouldn’t be out of place in the mouth of Gracie Abrams; still, distortion crackles overhead, while drums pummel and pop like something off the latest Bully record. Evenson’s instincts have always leaned pop, and now she and producer Nydge have built a widescreen, electric sound to match. “You Poor Thing” has its loping rhythm periodically interrupted by screams and blasts of noise, as Evenson’s chiming guitar mocks the unfortunate soul to be on the receiving end of her vitriol. “You look pretty/on your knees,” she coos, and it’s hard to tell which lines come from her, and which she’s parrotting from the “golden coaster, fuckin’ freeloader” who’s the song’s target.
Evenson’s voice—which is to say, both her writerly voice and her actual timbre—puts her in the fabulously bratty lineage of that dog., Veruca Salt, and Charly Bliss. The way her tongue dances around the alliteration of “friends who fuck around” on “Cross My Fingers” injects its otherwise saccharine lyrics with a perfect dose of venom. Meanwhile, “I want you, and I need you, so come for me/and I want you, and I need you, so comfort me” from “Something In The Water” is Evenson’s own twisted version of “come right on me—I mean camaraderie,” delivered atop a bed of mellow pop-rock that fizzes like actual Pop Rocks. The storytelling on BLUE SUPER LOVE also gets an assist from carefully deployed vocal effects. The breakdown of “Something In The Water” pans Evenson’s voice side to side as she sings “I’m always here, I’m always there,” and on “One Trick Pony,” an arsenal of glitches capture the effect of twisting oneself into the ideal lover in real time.
