It takes a skilled singer-songwriter to turn everyday scenes and moods into enchantment. To do that work while neither romanticizing nor vilifying—to let the mundane be mundane and to appreciate it for that—takes an expert. On their new self-titled release, Brooklyn-based Wendy Eisenberg is that expert. They strike a perfect balance: each track is a wonder, and yet is grounded; Eisenberg has a poignant grasp of their poetics, yet writes and sings without a hint of pretence. With pastoral folk leanings and personal themes with contemporary resonance, Wendy Eisenberg is unassumingly luminous and irreproachable in its sincerity.
The melodies at hand are essentially simple ones, beautifully so. Each song is based around Eisenberg’s guitar, which alternately pulses and sparkles. They blossom further with the support of Trevor Dunn on bass, Ryan Sawyer on drums, and co-producer Mari Rubio directing pedal steel, synths, and strings. It is another instance of balance: full sound, melancholy space. The latter is especially necessary in allowing Eisenberg’s thoughts and reflections the room they need to grow and move. It’s in Eisenberg’s lyrics, after all, that the record takes on a living, breathing, three-dimensional shape, and through which they connect us to the details of their world.
These are wildflower details, abundant and unconcerned with unnaturally tight patterns. Theirs is an organic harmony, natural rhythms emerging from variety. Eisenberg does not shy away from quotidian existentialism, singing “Nothing feels familiar and I’m scared about everyone leaving me / Everything I thought I knew, everything truest to me–was everybody lying?” with a soft hint of high-pitched panic amid fluttering violin in “Old Myth Dying”.
With a more resigned gravitas on casual-mystical “The Ultraworld”: “Dumbstruck and party to all of the virtues of my life I find / Their hidden messages have been revised! / Where was I when that happened?” In both tracks, Eisenberg philosophizes not only in their text but in the contours of their music, choosing notes slightly higher or lower than their most comfortable vocal range to stretch into precarious territory.
Intentional instabilities, in both pitch and affect, can be exciting. “Curious Bird” is yet another song on which Eisenberg breaks the calm of their pitch range to pop up or glide down over some of the album’s brightest instrumentation. “Vanity Paradox” builds on a soothing musical foundation that allows for a sharper contrast when, halfway through, strings start squirming into abstract tangles that emphasize the internal struggle Eisenberg articulates in lines like “Improbably I found another way / To make it through another day / Undaunted by the silence at the core / Like water eats away at the shore.”
Still other tracks offer ephemerality, as in the self-aware nostalgia of gentle tracks “Another Lifetime Floats Away” and “It’s Here”, both of which feature Eisenberg reflecting on youth and growth with uncynical wit.
Authenticity is a slippery discursive trope, especially in discussions about art. It’s hard to explain exactly what makes Wendy Eisenberg’s music feel real, how it grips so firmly, but it does. Eisenberg knows not only the art but the craft of songwriting, and on Wendy Eisenberg, they bring their truest self, never compromising, never pushing, always being. The results are absolutely stunning.