This album certainly grew on me. I initially liked the jangly pop sound (that faux ’70s movie poster album cover is no accident), but was put off by the jarring cool of Houston’s voice. It’s not just that her voice never quite leaves the same note; it’s more that she sounds so blasé about it, as if she’s not even trying to leave that one note. Especially with jangly pop, I usually expect at least a stab at the sound of soaring Byrds-like (or Bangles-like) harmonies at the emotions and subjects those sounds usually go with. Stuff about wandering bootheels or going down to Liverpool.
Instead, Houston talks as much as she sings. Even the leadoff track, a relatively straightforward love song about trust and optimism (“If you’re finding out life is not a bed of clover / Just turn around and call me ’cause I’m always looking over”) doesn’t sound ebullient or plaintive in the way most jangly pop songs with such lyrics would. My initial disappointment, especially after the album took up themes of violence, revenge, and murder, was that Houson was taking up themes that she wasn’t capable of expressing, at least not as a singer. If lots of the old blues singers also sung about violence, revenge, and murder without busting a gut (as with heavy metal), none of them sounded as languid as Houston often does, either.
But the title track, on maybe the fourth listen, came as a sort of revelation. With its flashes of raucous guitar and strident vocals (over lines like “She’s going to burn down someone’s house”) against the calm of the rest of the song, the song makes an aesthetic sense out of the chilly dissonance that informs most of the music and the singing. Against descriptions of a spinelessly half-repentant rapist (“You can’t look her in the eye / She knows a few too many things”), the song describes the titular character still seething at the memory of “the way you fucked her dry” and how “she might come back any day” to “burn down someone’s house, just to dry her wings”.
Or, in a less violent context, the next song, “Flight 609”, has its narrator leaving a lover by plane and remembering everything as the plane takes off. Waiting for the refreshments to be served, she tells herself she remembers falling for the line “You’re my angel, light and pure”, then privately adds to herself, “Baby want a whole lot more”.
In this context, Penelope’s calm is no longer about not being unable to feel (or express) emotion. Rather, freed from surrounding and time during the jagged disconnect of a plane flight (“my rocketship aims at the moon”), Houston recounts the dreamy affair that a traditional pop song would memorialize, “a crazy quilt / Of fields and plans dreams”. But instead of paying it loving homage, she sees the affair, as she sees the literal landscape in which it happened, from a lofty, detached height. Rather than not feeling or enjoying the escapism of an idyllic affair, the narrator is not satisfied with what it offers: she is not content with being the light and pure angel of anyone’s fantasy.
The soundtrack “theme” of the album is thus entirely appropriate. Things and emotions do happen under the cool exterior of Houston’s voice and the jangly music that never quite spirals out into freely floating melodies. Rather, the album functions as a soundtrack in that it presents and observes incidents, playing up nuances while remaining mostly unobtrusive. It then zeroes in on specific incidents of action (like the piercing violin that accompanies the shower scene in Psycho), only to retreat into the background once more.
That retreat, though, emphasizes the clarity of the emotions themselves. Rather than overwhelming the described incidents and feelings or — more commonly in pop music — embodying those emotions, Houston’s music, when not broken by climactic moments of confrontation, observes things from a distance. And since the emotions here are entirely fitting results for the violence and heartbreak of the incidents described, there’s a powerful tension between the fucked-up subject matter and the cool of its portrayal. Can comparisons to Nico be far behind?