April is the cruellest month. You Are Spring!, the fourth album from Chicago-born, New York-based singer-songwriter Tasha Viets-VanLear, is decorated by soft flutters of woodwind and languid harmonies. It conjures a fantasy universe of analgesic pleasures. And like all little utopias it is imposed upon by a more complicated and painful reality.
Even on the paradisiac-seeming a cappella introduction, a collaboration with Jamila Woods and L’Rain, something lingers in the foreground. The album’s opening line may sound like a positive affirmation—“Don’t die now/There is life to be found now”—but someone’s clearly close to dying, thinking about it, drifting into its orbit. Viets-VanLear sets up a vision of spring with “No fear/No heartbreak crawling near/No grieving/No goodbyes/No leaving,” which is immediately interrupted by “Clarion” and its melancholy opening line. “I feel the long road swallow me whole/Always goodbye, always time to go,” she sings. It’s a woozy song, with little swells of keys and playful staccato bass, and it lands again on a headrush of possibility (“Oh, it’s only up from here!”), but it’s easy to wonder if Viets-VanLear isn’t telling herself this as a bulwark against loss and regret.
No score yet, be the first to add.
The illusion she constructs around these lines really is inviting though. The influence of Sufjan Stevens is more present than on any of Tasha’s previous albums—understandably so given that she wrote much of it while moving her life from Chicago to New York to play in the Broadway run of the musical Illinoise, based on his album of the same name. But while they share a sense of rousing whimsy, the pace is markedly different. Most songs here feel as though they’re being played a little slower than they were written: drums a little tipsy, acoustic guitars loosely strummed with bare fingers, melodies picked out one sleepy note at a time in the middle register of a box piano.
A handful of songs make space for Viets-VanLear’s clarinet, which she mostly taught herself in as a way to jump-start some inspiration between albums. Perhaps because she’s a relative beginner, she keeps those moments refreshingly simple. The solo at the end of “Special” in particular is sultry and somnambulant, and it rescues a song that otherwise threatens to fall too far into into her fantasy, foregoing richer detail (“I love the way the rain sounds,” she sings, and offers little more).
For all this intermingling of euphoria and mournfulness, the two most striking moments on You Are Spring! are its most extreme. The first, “Ending,” in the middle of the record, is a grand piano ballad unlike anything in Tasha’s catalog, and it’s bleak. “Do you imagine what will happen when the ending comes?” she asks. “If you were waiting for the worst can’t you see it’s now?/Aren’t you worried, don’t you ache at the thought of how/We’ll be remembered?/Will this even be remembered?” It’s a 2 a.m. anxiety attack made manifest, a sharpening of the senses that brings a clarity to the heady songs around it.
