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On A Little Contact of Schleicher within the Night time, Katie von Schleicher is a luckless harlequin on a velvet stage, showcasing an array of indignities in opposition to a luxe backdrop of strings and woodwinds. She’s a clown; a loud talker making fake pas; a deadpan underdog. Like Harry Nilsson on A Little Contact of Schmilsson within the Night time, she makes being a loser sound lush, teetering between cheeky, aggressively charming pop and dreamy balladry.
The Brooklyn singer-songwriter’s newest album is extra acerbic than 2017’s Shitty Hits and 2020’s Consummation, the pay-off, maybe, of writing courses taken throughout a lean interval with out a reserving agent or a plan. “Truthfully my tight 5 wants work,” she confesses on opener “Montagnard Individuals,” however the songs right here delight like a sequence of intelligent, well-timed punchlines. Her candor makes her a protagonist price rooting for. “Whenever you’re mourning the previous/You’ll keep in mind your ass,” she sings, recalling lapsed recommendation to take nudes whereas she’s nonetheless younger and sizzling. She snoozes the alarm below a heap of pillows and suffers from week-long migraines. “I put on turning into like a burlap sack,” she says on “Elixir.” Someplace between Faye Webster and Eleanor Friedberger, von Schleicher delivers her sermon from inside a dialog pit, sunk deep whereas the hubbub transpires a couple of toes away.
The quips are the album’s most noticeable gems, and so they shine all of the extra inside such atmospheric manufacturing. A Little Contact of Schleicher within the Night time is a wonderful attestation to von Schleicher and collaborator Sam Griffin Owens’ course: Each tune sounds textured and multifaceted, with regular builds and decrescendos that juxtapose pleasure with the comedown. The preparations—a menagerie of saxophones, clarinets, and violins with the jaunty bounce of guitar chords—stroll a tightrope between the schmaltz of a Herb Alpert file and the evocative swell of Brenda Lee’s “Feelings.” It succeeds as get together music, the type that begins jubilantly and lapses into wine-drunk silence. Though sometimes, like on “Bottle It,” von Schleicher slows down the tempo and dangers killing the excitement.
The album will not be all joyless rides and events, surfacing uncooked anxieties about failure and being left behind. But it surely finds solace in revelry: “Tonight I’m a dancer/I wanna really feel alright/There are one million worries, I do know,” she sings on “Elixir.” If time and existentialism comes for us all, the perfect we are able to ask for is an image of our ass at 25 and a pop tune on the radio whereas we languish on a California freeway. A Little Contact of Schleicher within the Night time gilds indignity with glamor, a winsome paean to shiftlessness and melancholy.
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