Julia Holter: "Feel You"
There is a sea of possibilities, and Julia Holter found it alone in a crowd. It comes at the very end of “Feel You”, her most vivid piece of literary chamber pop yet, as Holter’s voice rises to a sublime girl-group incantation, pouring down. “Thousands of people pass through on the festival day,” she slowly intones. “Playing their saxophones/ I see a flashing light…” And then comes a revelation—abstract as it may be—a moment of inspiration among a quotidian routine. Holter hovers there, over this euphoric swell, a finale that radiates like the sun cracking open a cloud. It is but one moment on “Feel You” where Holter sees the poetry in everyday life, not unlike an optimistic man she once quoted in song: Frank O’Hara.
“Feel You” has enough punchy narrative flair to animate a multi-act play in miniature, or an American short story—a tale of woman on her own in motion, a sensory meditation on the push-and-pull of blissed-out urban chaos. Holter stars, an affably forgetful protagonist who sings of finding anonymity in a raincoat; it seems she would dance and fall with grace, elegant but charmingly imperfect, not unlike Frances Ha. She is fleeing home: “My first thought was/ There are so many days of rain in Mexico City,” Holter sings, punctuating each bouyant syllable, building more momentum than usual. “A good reason to go/ You know I love to run away from sun.” (She knows when to stay in and get things done.)
With an off-kilter ’80s bounce, you could picture “Feel You” next to the wide-open scenes of Love Is Overtaking Me; it has a breezy realism only hinted at on 2013′s epic Loud City Song. (Still, nobody articulates the word “mythological” with such ease and magic as Holter does here, the song’s angelic atmosphere floating beneath her, at once dreamlike and precise.) “Feel You”‘s message is disarmingly simple, underscored by the wonder of its accompanying visual, in which Holter wanders pensively alongside a tiny dog. It captures not just the potential of solitude as one small person in this dizzying world, but also its quiet thrill.
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