Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers Review (Nick)
Phoebe f***ing Bridgers has done it (this is also the name of her website)
Punisher is Phoebe’s second release, and it certainly made my top albums for 2020 list (there’s no actual list anywhere but more a “oh yeah, that was a great one” mental list). This album is overly dark (perfect for 2020) which is an amazing contrast to her bright and high vocals, which almost feel like sunshine shining through storm clouds. This album was also my introduction to Phoebe, and I love it/her so much that when I was adopting a cat, my first choice was a kitten named Phoebe (and yes, I frequently make her listen to Punisher with me to get to know her namesake).
So first, I want to talk about the songwriting, because it’s something really special. If you’re familiar with Phoebe at all, you’ll know that her main axe is a Danelectro Baritone guitar, and only recently I realized her use of capos was essentially a way to get drop tunings without having to go through the whole thing, and possibly because of the gnarly huge sounds she gets from that thing. The baritone guitar and drop tunings are also a great choice, because as I said before, the dark tones of this guitar are an amazing contrast to her high and bright vocals. I believe it was in a masterclass with the vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, where she said pianist Vijay Iyer told her that the way to sound huge on the piano is to play two notes on the opposite ends of the piano (one really low, and the other really high).
Not to get overly technical, but if you’re unfamiliar with how waveforms and sound in general work, musical notes are simply fast and slow vibrations (or as Adam Neely calls it: Squiggly air). The higher the pitches, the faster the vibration, and the lower the pitches, the slower the vibration. Whenever we experience dissonance in music, it’s because we have two pitches vibrating at a similar speed, but they don’t quite line up and the dissonance we hear is the rub of the two squiggly air clashing with one another. When you have this extreme range in between, the clashing is gone because the two pitches are moving at their own speed. And that I think is one common thread in Phoebe’s music that makes it sound great.
Another aspect of the songwriting is the orchestration of the whole thing; every song has this insanely relentless forward momentum that drives each song. No two verses are exactly the same, nor are the choruses. But the best part about it, in my opinion, is that it’s extremely subtle. Sometimes it’s the addition of another instrument, others it’s taking away instruments, and sometimes it’s taking the same piece of musical information and placing it on another instrument. I took an arranging class with Rich Shemaria, and one of the things he said that stuck with me is: “Don’t sit in a room and watch the paint dry,” which was his way of telling us to keep the music moving forward, and I think this album gives a fantastic demonstration of that. I think this element is present in not only the individual songs, but the progression also happens throughout the course of the album.
But now, let’s get into the individual songs.
The record starts off with “DVD Menu,” a very moody short song to get us into the album. There’s such a beautiful combination of low electric strings in tandem with Rob Moose playing multiple orchestral strings (and big props to Rob for doing all of the string arrangements on this album), which isn’t such a common group for indie rock albums. This track almost sounds as if it’s a guitar with the tone knob rolled all the way off (pretty muddy) and gradually rolling it all the way up (gradually getting brighter). Rob’s beautiful melody is eventually joined by Phoebe singing the lyric-less melody, with her vocals pretty tucked and drenched in reverb. Big moods.
From there we have a seamless transition into “Garden Song” with some of the same low-end textures from the previous song (without the strings) and we finally experience Phoebe’s classic story-telling vocals for the first time. Phoebe and I are about the same age and grew up around the same time, and one aspect I love is that it feels like when you were talking to your friend on your parent’s landline, and said friend was giving you the dirt on some story. One lyric I really love is: “The doctor put her hands over my liver - She told me my resentment's getting smaller,” and for multiple reasons. For one, that’s just a great sentence, because if you weren’t paying too much attention to the line, you would think it’s realistic, but sadly you cannot measure one’s resentment by putting your hands over their liver. But another reason is that she had a perfect opportunity to rhyme and chose not to, which contributes to this “friend telling you a story” type of vibe. And finally, the music nerd in me is happy that she didn’t resolve back to the first chord, oh the suspense.
The first two tracks so far have been really low-key and calm, but then we dive right into “Kyoto,” and this one is a really driving indie rock banger. At first hearing this, I really didn’t like this song because I was really enjoying that calm and dreary vibe, but I think this tug of war serves well to “not watch the paint dry.” The musical content is amazing (I even did a harmonic analysis video of this song on my personal YouTube channel) but what I really dig is the production and choices of instrumentation. Here you have this classic rock band (two guitars, bass, drums, vocals) but then you have trumpets and strings playing these motifs and angelic, reverb-y background vocals that really fill out the song. And to get real nerdy about it, the chorus starts on the ii chord (C#m) and the first note she sings is an A#, which is the natural 6 of the chord, giving a big Dorian sound. That’s something you don’t hear too often in indie rock, a lot of melodies fall on the thirds of each chord, but I’m here for it. Thank you, Phoebz (or Pharbz, which is what I call my cat).
And now for the fourth track, we get to the title track, “Punisher.” Here we return to the subtle and dark vibe of the first two tracks, and I think the most interesting thing in this is the vocal processing on Phoebe’s vocals. In the verses, there’s a second line that’s a little reminiscent of Bon Iver that’s going through a gnarly vocal synth, which never really gets in the way of Phoebe’s lead vocals; a perfect compliment. (sidebar; if you’re interested in getting this sound, I believe Justin Vernon [or whoever produces for Bon Iver] uses Ovox by Waves, and Izotope has a gnarly Vocal Synth plugin). And to my earlier point of Phoebe keeping that relentless forward momentum, the vocals continue expanding and changing throughout the song. Towards the end of the verses, the vocal synth tapers off and there’s suddenly a burst of reverb on her vocals, but the last unaccompanied vocals lines have barely any reverb at all. And after that moment of tension, it brings us to the chorus where we have the classic double tracked, hard panned vocals that just make everything sounds bigger. And on top of that, we have a really interesting ensemble for this song, with instruments like piano and strings. It’s almost like a modern chamber ensemble.
One of my favorite lyrics from this song is: “The only real reason I moved to the east side - I love a good place to hide in plain sight.” An interesting thing that happens with the instrumentation is that the line “in plain sight” is completely exposed; all of the other instruments dropped out and her vocals are in plain sight (we also catch this at the end where the last lyric is “stop” and all instruments drop out on that line and the song ends on stop). And if we look at the previous lyric, she sings “The drug stores are open all night,” and so we can interpret these lyrics in a few ways: “The drug stores are open all night, The only real reason I moved to the east side,” or “The only real reason I moved to the east side - I love a good place to hide in plain sight,” where the first is that she moved to the east side for the all night drug stores (woooo party), and the second is because the east side provides a good place to hide in plain sight. I think it’s both, but I think the subtle ambiguity provides a lot of lyrical excitement.
“Punisher” transitions very nicely into the next spoopy track, “Halloween,” which starts off with more ambiguity/deception. I’m pretty sure the intro is some combination of muted guitar/bass/baritone guitar (with some really interesting panning, I have to say), but the more I listen to it, the more I convince myself that it’s pizzicato (plucked, opposed to bowed) strings. Then there’s also that weird reverse-y muted trumpet that has a few nice melodic statements, and it was during my last listen when I realized that up until now, the only song with drums was Kyoto, and Halloween brings this nice mallet-y groove to it. All of these elements in combination give it this sense of another faux chamber ensemble.
And another centerpiece of “Halloween” is the vocals. We get these classic story-telling lyrics, but what stuck out to me was the background vocals, and specifically the intervals within the background vocals. Not only were they a really interesting melodic line, but also the intervals between the background and lead vocals were very interesting, creating a sort of multi-dimensional intervallic cool-ness. Not to mention, the awesome celebrity shot from Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes) towards the end.
Then, we’re hit with the driving baritone goodness of “Chinese Satellite,” which introduces a change of pace done in a sort of non-traditional way (I think this is something you might expect from the drums). And again, let’s all appreciate how the low baritone guitar compliments her voice… But anyway, this is another song that develops in a really cool way, with the choruses being just a string quartet and Phoebe’s vocals (now we have an actual chamber ensemble), but that points me to a big question: which section is the chorus? The form is pretty clear-cut, except for that one question. We start with an intro, then it goes right into the verse, into what might be a chorus? (She says the lyric “Chinese Satellite” and we reach a sort of high point - relative to what we’ve heard so far) But immediately after, we have this sort of lower-energy string quartet vibe change, before we go into a higher intensity/more instrumentated (if that’s a word) second verse. I’d maybe call this a post-chorus. But moving past this, with each repeated section you have an even higher intensity version of the previous section. The final “post-chorus” has driving drums that replaced the string quartet, and each verse gets bigger and bigger. I think a part of that is how many effects and instruments are used (like the reverse vocals in the first verse that don’t quite line up - until they do and it’s almost like in that one Scooby Doo movie where the ghost goes into one of the gang members? I think?).
“Moon Songs” brings the energy back, and we have our first obligatory “Indie rock song in 3/4" moment. One thing that stuck out to me here was the way the drums were recorded/processed. The whole kit sounds pretty lo-fi, but the kick and snare are really clear, and when I was thinking of how they potentially mic’d these drums, I imagined an iphone hanging as an overhead mic, and a mic on the kick and snare, with all of the high end information gone (which is sort of what I was saying about Phoebe’s voice contrasting with the low instruments, but now instead of pitches we’re talking frequency information and clever ways of using EQ). Also, bonus points for mentioning a few dad rock musicians.
Phoebe did a risky move with track 8, with “Savior Complex” also being in 3/4 (a big jazz school no-no), but the vibe is different enough that it works. This one I felt was another example of a modern chamber ensemble, with a bunch of what I consider to be background sounds to Phoebe’s voice and guitar. I think part of what makes this song (and this album in general) work really well, is that I think if you took away the other elements and just kept Phoebe’s voice and guitar, you’d still have a great song. All of the other instruments are augmented and supplement the music, rather than being flashy or overt (which is I think how they fit so many instruments and sounds in the track, along with being very gradual about it and not having them all at the same time). The harmony in this song is also pretty interesting, incorporating that A (major IV) to Am (minor iv) (like “In My Life” by The Beatles or “Wake Me Up When September Ends” by Green Day) tiny chromaticism that just propels the whole thing further (another sidebar: there’s another blog post I wrote about mode-mixture, and how to subtly use chords outside of a key). The song eventually jumps into this big G major-ish swelling vamp which I think you don’t hear a lot of in this genre, that pulls back so well into the verse chords, and finally ending on that Am (minor iv chord), again leaving us with no resolution.
That lack of resolution though, leads really nicely into “ICU” a clever play on words. The lyric is: “I feel something, when I see you [ICU],” which to me says “When I see you, I feel like I need to go to the intensive care unit of a hospital,” and I think that’s genius. On top of that, we have these huge almost 80s revival sounding drums and all of the counterlines are so dang catchy. The whole vibe of this track is kind of funny in relation to the next track, “Graceland Too.” Out of nowhere, at the 10th track, we’ve landed in folk territory. This is one of the tracks that gets stuck in my head a lot for some reason, and it’s also really cool that we have a guest appearance from Phoebe’s other group Boy Genius, featuring Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker.
The final track, and I think definitely my favorite from the album, is “I Know The End,” a perfect way to end the book and a great example of how to develop a song in under 6 minutes and still have a bunch of cohesive sections. This song I think incorporates a lot of the really cool elements of the album, smushed together in one song, but not in an obnoxious way (like how in “Punisher” she sang “In plain sight” with no instruments behind her, she also sings the word “lightning” and we hear a crash right after. One part of the harmony I really dig is the change from Db major to Db minor where everything starts to get nuts, I think solidly signaling the plummet into chaos.
Phoebe even uses a technique from classical music: motivic development (although definitely not exclusive to the genre). The theme on the violin from “DVD Menu” is back, with the trumpets playing almost the same melody but a half step higher. The change of instrumentation and key gives it this victorious kind of soaring feeling that really hits me. And then finally, we have the cataclysmic chanting of “The end is near” with Phoebe just straight up screaming as everything is progressively getting more intense. We also hear a bit of humor in Phoebe with her still quietly yelling (what a concept) and laughing in between her hushed screams.
All in all, this album is one of my new favorites. On this blog, we’re not giving ratings, because we don’t believe the highly subjective art form known as music should get a grade, but I’d definitely recommend checking this one out. I hope you enjoy reading this (and I can only hope that you enjoy this almost as much as the album) but for more, you can check out our podcast, where Sean and I discuss what we liked and didn’t like about the album. Sean will also be releasing his review of the album in the next few days, so stay tuned for that! (Unless you’re in the future). Remember to buy the music directly from the artist, and thanks for reading!
——Nick
https://phoebebridgers.bandcamp.com/album/punisher