Album Review: Phoebe Bridgers – Punisher


Punisher




It seems that the release of Fiona Apple’s Fetch The Bolt Cutters might have been a turning point for women making music, both in the way they’re perceived and the creative pressure they experience to mould with conformity. Abandoned and switching from good to bad cop and back again, the singer’s courageous approach has netted streaming numbers in the tens of millions.

Phoebe Bridgers is a fan, and the pair have an unwanted common bond in experiencing the fallout from abusive relationships; Bridgers was one of the numerous alleged victims of Ryan Adams’ exploitative behaviour, a bruising experience recounted on Motion Sickness from her debut album Stranger In The Alps.

Like Apple, it feels like the singer’s new record is an attempt to re-calibrate what being a successful female artist means in her own terms – take Kyoto, one of Punisher’s most energetic moments, her sometimes lonely guitar bolstered by an upfront brass section, drums and bass. It might sound like this is a person wanting to break the glass ceiling which boxes in girl troubadours, but in fact the song is about feeling guilty for the privilege you yourself have earned.

Bridgers has a nineties child’s knack of being able to zoom in and out focus, to stack the banal and the vital next to each other; opener Garden Song is as wistfully beautiful as anything on her debut, but she confesses, ‘And when I grow up, I’m gonna look up/From my phone and see my life, before dousing a relationship with apathy: ‘You touch my leg, and I insist/But I wake up before we do it.’

It’s not unexpected, but is understandable, that some of this bravery to speak comes from strength in numbers: Punisher features contributions from Connor Oberst, as well as Nathaniel Walcott (of Bright Eyes), Nick Zinner (of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Jenny Lee Lindberg (of Warpaint) and Blake Mills. Of the results, the singer has declared without hubris: ‘I really love Punisher. If people hate it, I’m not scared.’

One of its defining qualities is a messiness, a blurring or lack of precision that often means you’re hearing these songs through a fog. The title-track has this unpolished vulnerability, one shared on the distorted Chinese Satellite, the thrashing drums intruding like the mischievous work of a blinded neighbour.

These playful and incongruous passages give some light, but they can’t always distract from a raft of plangent lyrics, as on Moon Song’s aching, slow burn dissolution; ‘But you’re holding me like water in your hands/When you saw the dead little bird/You started crying’.

Against this backdrop, risks are laughed at, ICU swelling, a love song in reverse, eroded rock and roll that bleeds from the nose, while the apocalyptic sounding finish of closer I Know The End sees the transformation complete; there’s no longer a place for Phoebe Bridgers other than the one that she chooses for herself.



As a rule-breaking head-map, Punisher is not the only unexpected item in an emotional baggage area heard this year, but it stands up to be counted proudly. The invisible lock, it seems, has snapped for good.

7.5/10

Andy Peterson


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