Julia Holter: "Sea Calls Me Home"

“Sea Calls Me Home” isn’t really a new Julia Holter song: It first appeared on 2010′s Live Recordings (released through NNA Tapes), where its evident magic was buried beneath waves of burbling hiss. The forthcoming Have You in My Wilderness feels like its natural home. On Holter’s fourth album, producer Cole M. Greif-Neill floods the L.A. artist’s extraordinary vocals in piercing light, foregrounding her songwriterly qualities—and all the better to evoke her infectious wonder at the ocean’s clarity. Every syllable of the chorus—”I can’t swim! Its lucidity! So clear!”—is a perfect swan dive. Every strand of the accompanying harpsichord trill glimmers like a dewy frond articulated by the breeze, recalling the baroque sparkle of Holter’s sea-gazing California forebears the Beach Boys circa Smile. As a recording, it’s completely ravishing.

So much of Holter’s recent work—“Feel You”, much of 2013′s Loud City Song—takes place in the city, a place of pursuit, missed appointments, and surveillance, where one’s identity must be constantly navigated like unfamiliar streets. “Sea Calls Me Home” is a moment of escape, of casting off social expectations and submitting to the water’s easy, joyful oblivion. Holter captures the familiar relief that every coastal-born person feels when they see the water, of embrace rather than chilly shock: “Wear the fog, I’ll forget the rules I’ve known/ Look in cloud’s mirror/ When the sea calls me home.” Just in case the shore wasn’t far enough in the distance, a wild saxophone blows in to clear it from memory. That boisterous blare aligns it with the avant-garde tag that tends to follow Holter, but there’s no mistaking it: “Sea Calls Me Home” is a miniature pop symphony.

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