U.e.’s Other Girl is a singer-songwriter album that strips away a lot of the singing and even more of the songwriting. With the words buried behind layers of interference, the music itself is left to do most of the emotional legwork, and while the palette is the sort traditionally associated with “intimacy” in Western pop music—acoustic guitars, piano chords you can feel in your chest—there’s no readymade narrative to map onto these 10 songs. You can either let this obscure approach bewilder you or treat it as a blank slate on which you can map your own feelings. From this angle, the spaces between the chords can fill with your own thoughts, and the distance between these recordings and your ears can stand in for the distance from whatever you yearn for in your own past.
Released two weeks before Christmas and perfect for the dark doldrums around the holidays, Other Girl bookends last year with January’s Hometown Girl, the debut of the newest moniker from the artist otherwise known as Ulla. Among the West Mineral-adjacent wave of American ambient music, she has long been the most indebted to the DIY indiesphere, balancing the gauzy approach of Y2K clicks ‘n’ cuts music with a hangdog emo sensibility evocative of bleary mornings spent playing the guitar at the edge of the bed. All the signifiers of raw, authentic music are present on Other Girl, but they’re untethered to any particular plane of reality; it’s like the Backrooms if every room were piled with yesterday’s clothes and strewn with roach-littered ashtrays.
Hometown Girl was lo-fi in the sense that you could hear the clicks of the keys on the woodwinds, but the production here is deliberately tarnished. “Baggy” is like the inverse of early Mountain Goats cassettes, imagining what would happen if the Panasonic fuzz on All Hail West Texas won the war against John Darnielle’s vocals, while the vocal take on “Back of Head” sounds like it was recorded through cheap Apple earbuds or an Edison-era phonograph. On “Weird Door,” she paints her voice with an insectoid vocoder reminiscent of those used by the great Texas ambient duo More Eaze and Claire Rousay. (Another precedent for this music is the 1998 self-titled album from Mark Hollis, an ur-text for singer-songwriters using emotional vaguery as its own language.)
The result of this approach is to make the songs sound like snapshots of a time, place, and process: ideas jotted down quickly with no regard for fidelity, as if they were never meant to be heard by anyone but the artist. At first, it might sound unfinished, but the missing piece is right there in your head: the personal associations you bring to these songs. I recommend listening to the album on headphones in a place with deep personal significance—maybe your high school stomping ground, or anywhere else where your memories can mingle with the music.
