Taken one way, the songs on Luster are desolately lonely, beamed out into the bracing Connemara ether or directed towards a “you” that is nowhere to be seen. “Projections of you/In my head,” she sings huskily on the chorus of “Projections”; on “Stonefly,” she repeats, “Without you…” like a mantra over synth swirls that harken back to “hypnagogic pop.” Certain lyrical motifs resurface again and again—the sea, the sky, the path. The word “time” appears more frequently than I can count: On “Spring,” it comes in waves that ebb perpetually away, and on the breathtaking “Garden,” she swims through time itself, past dark caves and out toward warmer waters. Is she swimming forward in time, or back? A secret third direction, she clarifies: “Into.”
And yet Luster is the least insular of Somerville’s projects—perhaps excluding last year’s Princ€ss, the debut from the mysterious collective of the same name, of which Luster’s press notes reveal Somerville to be a contributor. (In retrospect, it isn’t hard to spot her fingerprints on songs like “Sometimes” and “In My Head.”) Where she recorded All My People for the most part alone, here she collaborates with a handful of mostly Irish musicians who fit into the mix so subtly you barely register they’re there: the harpist Róisín Berkeley on the starry-eyed “Réalt,” guitar from Connemara native Olan Monk on “Stonefly,” uilleann pipes from Lankum’s Ian Lynch tucked into “Violet,” plus broader contributions from Henry Earnest and Finn Carraher McDonald. Perhaps as a result, there is a holisticism to the hero’s journey on which Somerville embarks—a feeling that you’re not alone, especially when you are.
At times a lyric sheet is required to discern what Somerville is singing: The distinctly Grouper-esque “Halo” obscures a reverie of ancient Irish mysticism with thick clouds of reverb. Written out, Luster’s lyrics can feel a little unresolved: “I can see/More clearly than I could before/I know now/What’s true/For me,” from “Trip,” is a sentiment so simple it verges on trite. But that’s exactly the appeal of “Violet,” on which Somerville channels Carla dal Forno’s goth-folk romance, singing in the woolly way your voice sounds when you wake up: “Burden of life/Life is love/Love is time/Time is love/So many things in the air.” What could be sophomoric simply registers as true, then dissipates before the thought solidifies. “Everything is…” she sighs, but I can’t make out the rest, as if she’d traced the final word onto a steamy bathroom mirror. In any case, what matters is it’s spring, and wild strawberries are growing along the path outside her house.
