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thebloodhound liked ItsAndrew's post in the thread Album Lucy Dacus - Home Video (June 25, 2021).

thebloodhound liked Melody Bot's post in the thread Katie Pruitt – Mantras.

<div class="import_notice">This article has been imported from <a href="https://chorus.fm/reviews/katie-pruitt-mantras/">chorus.fm</a> for discussion. All of the <a href="http://forum.chorus.fm/help/rules/">forum rules</a> still apply.</div> <br> <div class="ch_import"><p>What do you do when all the things you thought you could count on betray you? Your religion, your family, your significant other, your society, your own mind? On <em>Mantras</em>, <a href="https://chorus.fm/tag/katie-pruitt/"><strong>Katie Pruitt</strong></a> finds herself grappling with precisely that question. It’s an album about trying to find a new way to exist and thrive – or maybe just cope – in a world that repeatedly insists on ripping the rug out from under you. It is provocative and relevant and unflinching and so very human. And it is the first genuine masterpiece of 2024.</p> <p>Pruitt arrived on the scene four years ago with her debut album <em>Expectations</em>, a sublime disc about self-discovery, coming-of-age, and reckoning with a world that is a whole lot darker and crueler than you thought it would be when you were young. Pruitt, who is openly gay and making music adjacent to the infamously conservative and old-fashioned country music industry, wrote candidly on that album about her sexuality and how she’d navigated years of fear, guilt, and yearning for acceptance. <em>Expectations </em>ultimately seemed to sketch out a happy ending to that turmoil: Of the last three songs, one was about her parents accepting her for who she was and the other two were earnest love songs for the woman she was sharing her life with.</p> <p>But real life doesn’t work like the movies, and you don’t just get to ride off into the sunset and roll the credits when you hit those moments of contentment where everything seems to be going well. <em>Expectations </em>was maybe better proof of that fact than anything, given that it dropped on February 21, 2020 – three weeks before the world started collapsing in on itself under the weight of COVID-19. Like so many other albums released in those weeks immediately before or after lockdown, Pruitt’s long-awaited debut was largely swept aside by the global upheaval of the moment, and her momentum as an up-and-coming artist with it.</p> <p>Four years have now passed since <em>Expectations</em>, and since the dark days of uncertainty and anxiety that surrounded its release. <em>Mantras</em>, Pruitt’s first new music since then – give or take a standalone single or two – is a reckoning with the ways the world has changed in the interim, and her life with it. Where the last album seemed to gesture toward the kind of movie-script happy ending all of us would love to get, this one doesn’t suggest those kinds of easy answers or resolutions. Instead, it’s a record that wears the traumas and scars of the past four years on its sleeve, and that boldly and proudly explores all the shades of gray that exist in places where many of us used to see only black and white.</p> <p>“Clinging to any meaning you can find/We’re all desperate to feel something divine” Pruitt sings in the bridge of album opener “All My Friends.” It’s a song about coping mechanisms and the things we turn to for solace when life gets hard: religion, self-help books, drugs, maybe even the mystic arts. A lapsed Catholic who has been vocal about all the damage her religious upbringing did to her, Pruitt has never been shy about taking shots at spirituality or its deep hypocrisy. It’s no mistake that <em>Mantras </em>starts with a verse about a friend who got stoned at their Catholic school reunion and then “moved away and unfriended the Jesus freaks.” </p> <p>On “All My Friends,” though, giving up on religion isn’t played as some easy punchline, because it means sacrificing what can be the biggest coping mechanism of all. I’ve thought a few times over the past few years about how comforting it might be to turn to prayer or faith in a higher power amidst moments of darkness – never mind the fact that I stopped believing in that stuff a long time ago. On this song and throughout the album, Pruitt finds herself searching for that solace somewhere else: a new shoulder to lean on, or – as she sings – “a new mantra, every other week.” “All my friends are finding new beliefs,” goes the song’s key line, and it might as well be the thesis statement for the album: Just because you let go of one crutch doesn’t mean you don’t go replace it with something else.</p> <p>Pruitt spends the rest of <em>Mantras </em>exploring the ways in which our little coping mechanisms can be both good and bad, for ourselves and the people in our lives. “Worst Case Scenario” and “Self Sabotage,” both album highlights, explore Pruitt’s work to make positive self-talk a part of her day-to-day routine, in hopes of living a happier and more enriching life. “My brain always goes/To the worst-case scenarios/Staying just anxious enough to keep me on my toes,” she admits in the latter. By the end of the song, she’s telling herself to find a “positive mantra” and “put it into action”: “Once in a while maybe I should try manifesting something good,” she muses, before adding, “Even if it doesn’t pan out like I thought it would/I think it’d do me good.”</p> <p>Speaking to <em>Nashville Scene </em><a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.nashvillescene.com/music/features/katie-pruitt-mantras-interview-nashville-music/article_669269bc-f11d-11ee-8368-bbfbc7503b85.html" target="_blank">in a recent interview</a>, Pruitt boiled her search for contentment down to a single idea: “I felt like my whole life, I’ve been reaching for external validation,” she explained. “Whether that’s with religion, or whether that’s with, like, pleasing grandparents, or just any adults in my life. And then I think it went from, like, pleasing a God to pleasing a girl… It never changed, though. I think I hit a point where I was like, ‘I need this to come from inside of me.’ I need this love and this validation to [be] intrinsic instead of extrinsic.”</p> <p>Pruitt arrived at that revelation in part because the relationship she spent much of <em>Expectations </em>singing about ended. <em>Mantras </em>is, in part, a breakup album, excavating the heartbreak of that relationship drawing to a close. Songs like “Leading Actress,” “The Waitress,” and “Phases of the Moon” offer nuanced reflections about why great love stories sometimes don’t have happy endings. Relationships are complicated; people are complicated; the ways our lives intersect are complicated. On a song called “Naïve Again,” Pruitt yearns to return to the simplicity of childhood, when friendships felt straightforward and adults seemed like paragons of wisdom and everything made sense. Increasingly, as you get older, <em>nothing</em> makes sense, which is part of the reason that finding validation, or happiness, or just the serenity of knowing that you are on the right path, is so damn hard.</p> <p><em>Mantras </em>is a tough album to write about because the ideas it explores aren’t clean or simple, either. Living is a messy experience – “one long dragged-out death sentence,” as Pruitt describes it in “Worst Case Scenario.” People we love leave. Religions that were supposed to be about love and forgiveness turn vile and violent. The family members who share our blood and most of our experiences are sometimes, inexplicably, the hardest people to relate to. Mantras that worked stop working. There’s so much uncertainty and doubt creeping around the edges of <em>Mantras</em>, so many open-ended question marks, that the album risks leaving the listener in some unsatisfying place, devoid of resolution. Certainly, the album offers no kind of clean “happily ever after” moment like <em>Expectations </em>seemed to. </p> <p>But then again, if life is messy, then maybe it makes sense for albums about life experiences to be messy too. And <em>Mantras</em>, with its searing, searching lyrics, haunting melodies, and beautifully jagged guitar moans, feels like a vital account of someone living and loving and hurting and growing. I can’t think of many albums that have done a better job at capturing what it’s like to live in this chaotic modern world we call our own.</p></div> <div class="expand"><span id="ex">more</span></div> <br> <div class="import_notice_bottom">Not all embedded content is displayed here. You can <a href="https://chorus.fm/reviews/katie-pruitt-mantras/">view the original</a> to see embedded videos and other embedded content.</div>

thebloodhound liked Craig Manning's post in the thread Album Katie Pruitt - Mantras (April 5, 2024).

Probably a slight step down from Expectations for me, but that's a top 2-3 album of the decade, in my mind.

thebloodhound liked irthesteve's post in the thread Album Katie Pruitt - Mantras (April 5, 2024).

UHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH This is immediately one of the best things I have heard all year