Even when she's looking backwards, she's moving ahead, caught somewhere between wanting to leave and being unable to let go, which can make her feel quite tricky to pin down.
Her debut album gives a sense of Ogier as the kind of aloof figure that you might find in the corner at a party; someone whose presence draws you closer, even if you're not quite sure why. It also does an excellent job of explaining just what that charm might be, adding up to a delicate yet hardy introduction to the Houston-born, Nashville-based artist: a Texas twang, fingerpicked guitar, and a healthy amount of the unexpected.
Ogier's lyrics feel tapped straight from her consciousness, finding a byway between Phoebe Bridgers' confessional songwriting and MJ Lenderman's conversational delivery, with a little of Waxahatchee-style Southern sensibility in there too for good measure. Ogier delivers each line with every earnest bone in her body, even when exposing her own shortcomings ("I tried to raise the bar / Got too high and missed," she laments on "West and Down").
The lo-fi vocals on opener "All These Dreams" hold a captivating directness ("You don't know what the fuck it's like to be a girl with all these dreams"), moving straight into "Baby Don't Hurt Me", where the titular pleading, coupled with the meter of its chorus, provides an immediate hook and sets the stakes high.
Shrouded in prose-like lyricism, has the feel of a diaristic offering. At times this approach can fold in on itself. "Hands Tied" is one such example: phrases tumble into each other, with Ogier's distorted vocals making her imagery hard to grasp, but there's still a charm to the lyrical riffing ("Pruning the porch plants / Ants in my handstand / Chant for my man"). In any case, the heavy chords and a rhythm that thrusts things forward satisfactorily enough to stops you from dwelling too long.
"Rocksteady/HeavyMetal", featuring fellow rising Nashville songwriter Eden Joel, deals with the push and pull of a relationship you can't, or won't, quit (“Kill the transmitter / But the lights keep running backwards"), elevated into an anthem with Ogier's shouts of "Feeling fuckin' fly." "W2F" has thunderous Zeppelin drums, screaming guitars, and a brooding riff, all straight out of the hard rock playbook. Ogier's softer vocals do their best to temper the aggro, before ultimately failing against the screeches and glitches that overwhelm in its dying moments. Truly, wholly awesome stuff in the most basic sense of the word.
As the album reaches its end, these brasher moments make way for the quietude that follows restlessness. Even for Ogier, it seems, motion can only be sustained for so long. "Fly" is gorgeous, if a little paint-by-numbers compared to everything before it. But there are still moments of beauty, while closer "Private Power" finds her accepting the transitory nature of life, even if it means you end up with a mouth full of self-reflection and perhaps the saddest admission of all ("Fucking call me / I don't miss you / Wish you'd want me").
refuses to be pigeonholed as an Americana offering. Ogier draws from all her influences without ever sounding beholden to them, finding something entirely her own in the spaces between vulnerability and volatility. Where she takes this next is a thrilling thought; maybe being restless isn't so bad.