When I sat down to listen to Light, the debut album of Charlottesville’s Juliana Daugherty, my roommate was cooking dinner in the kitchen/office amalgam where we work. Not even ten seconds into the opening track of the album he sounded from over the counter, “This is very shoegazy . . .” and while there is a spacey, somber feel to the project, I’m not sure I can agree with his assessment. In a lot of ways, in fact, this record reads as an act of quiet resistance to the sort of listless apathy inherent to that sort of music. On ‘Easier,’ Light’s sixth track, Daugherty sings “Oh my god / Does it take a mountain now / To tear my eyes from the ground?” If anything the gaze of this record is fixated on something barely discernible in the distance. The outline of a mountain, buried in fog and miles away. A promised cure to discontent that isn’t close enough, yet, to celebrate. It is a melancholic record, don’t get me wrong, but not implosively so, and its weariness floats, light as a feather, above minimalist folk stylings and Daugherty’s liquescent vocals.

At times the album reminded me of the almost anti-music of Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked At Me Once. The songs are so stripped down, so quiet, so barren of ornamentation that I became hyper-focused on what sounds were being offered up. At its most crowded, Light hits the soft, bouncing fringes of dream-pop with a thread of folk running throughout. At its most threadbare you get songs like ‘Bliss,’ where the only instrument is an electric guitar being played as softly as an electric guitar can be played. It drifts, slowly plucked behind Daugherty as her voices pours out like clear water down smooth stones: “Don’t say anything at all / Don’t say anything at all / You are gonna get it wrong.” It’s hard for me not to find this refrain significant, as if she isn’t just commanding an unseen listener, but the song itself. Urging it to remain quiet so as not to betray the vulnerability she is attempting to convey. We are again left with just her voice and a guitar, this time acoustic, on ‘Wave,’ the last song on the album. The guitar, once more, is a lightly-picked set piece for the vocals. “Oh, things are getting bad / I feel like I’ve been had / And I cannot find the thread again.” I know I’m not the first music writer to make the point that simplicity is not synonymous with ease. The more limitations put on a song, the harder it is to maintain depth. Daugherty doesn’t just maintain depth, though, she wrestles additional dimensions out of empty space. She is essentially bleeding a stone, and there is blood in these rocks.

Given the sparseness of instrumentation, a lot of the album hinges on her ability as a writer. Daugherty has her MFA in poetry and dammit it shows. There is at least one line in every song on Light that, when I first heard it, struck me viscerally. The lyrics, “I sink like lead, wolf in my bed / Your loveless provocations / Hold nothing sacred,” on ‘Baby Teeth’ cut, in few words, deep into the emptiness and terror that comes with sexuality in the age of American rape culture. ‘Revelation’ feels like a cross between an Irish folk arrangement and an Elliott Smith song with Daugherty enmeshing herself in a different sensation of disconnection: “Some days I measure every word that you have spoken / Like charting out the surface of an ocean / So easy to take comfort in the notion / That I know you—I know no one.” The lyrics, much like the melodies, are concise, but there is a world of solemn despondency, and sincerity thrumming beneath their surface. ‘Player,’ the opening song of the album, has her addressing an unknown figure. She sings with warbling lilt, “Curse all the light you see / Shots from the edge of some vast grief / I tried to find you there / I reach for your hand; I touch the air.” She spoke on the meaning of the song in an interview with NPR: “When I wrote ‘Player,’ I was thinking about the experience of watching someone close to you disappear down a rabbit hole: Falling deeper and deeper into some state of chaos that’s out of their control and yours, which could be addiction or obsession or depression or most anything else.” Usually, when lyrics are cryptic, I expect the musician to offer up some bullshit about “it meaning what you want it to means,” so I appreciate Daugherty’s willingness to candidly break that mystique as I don’t think it undercuts the impact of the song, or writing, at all. I also can’t understate how much I like her voice. It has all the haunting poetics of wind running through a thatch of reeds. It manages to hover above, like a ghost, while still pressing the full weight of each line into every song.

If I had to lodge criticism on this project it would be that for all its lightness, melancholy, and folksy meandering, it could have benefited from more anchoring percussion. The songs are beautiful, and maintain tension in their own right, but I can’t help but think that more rhythm would have granted it a sense of movement that, in the end, would have brought a nice counterbalance. ‘Player’ is by far the strongest entry on the record, and it’s due to the subdued pulse of drums that bubble and loll beneath everything else.

Maybe I’m projecting by saying that this album isn’t as forlorn as a majority of its subject matter presents itself to be, but there I hear unmistakable warmth pulsing deep within all of it. The songs on Light, with their sparse landscapes and gorgeous singing, beckon you to come and sit with them, to be enveloped in their softness. They are invitations for commiseration and empathy for the sadness that comes with living in the age of the hyper-political and digital everything. Daugherty feels lost, she cannot find the thread, she has watched people disappear. Knowing that she resides in Charlottesville, Virginia, an epicenter for social and political tumult, provides a sense of location and context for this angst. With Light, though, Juliana Daugherty peers cautiously from this darkness towards somewhere better, and full of music, in the distance.









Author Details Jordan Ranft Author Jordan Ranft is a California Bay Area native. His poetry has appeared in ‘Rust+Moth,’ ‘Midway,’ ‘(b)oink,’ and here. He has worked as an arts/culture and music writer for The East Bay Express, Sacramento News & Review, and Brokeassstuart.com. He’s at a point in his life where a lot of his favorite musicians are also his friends. It is delightful. Follow him on twitter, or don’t.

