Grief Creature

Riding a wave from her guest appearance on Macklemore & Ryan Lewis' 2012 international smash "Same Love," out and open singer/songwriter Mary Lambert released a couple of extended plays, a critically acclaimed album ("Heart on My Sleeve" in 2014), and then headlined Boston Pride's 2015 roster of entertainers. In the four and a half years since, Lambert's output has included the "Hang Out With You" single (2016), a featured artist appearance that same year on the "Hands" single (in tribute of the Orlando shooting casualties), another extended play with "Bold" (2017), and a poetry book last year titled "Shame is an Ocean I Swim Across."

"Grief Creature," Lambert's second full-length album, is self-produced and largely centered on her piano and voice. The album is generous in its seventeen tracks, and ranks among some of the more somber, emotionally devastating and sprawling piano-driven albums in the pop/rock era – Elton John's "Blue Moves" (1976) and Tori Amos' "Boys for Pele" (1996), in particular. But "Grief Creature" differs from those albums primarily in how moments levity are deployed. John's signature rock (in "Bite Your Lip (Get Up and Dance!)" and "Crazy Water") and Amos' sense of humor (for which she is never given enough credit – check out the playfully macabre "Mr. Zebra" and the opening lines of "In the Springtime of His Voodoo") are sprinkled between stark songs about excess and death (John's Edith Piaf tribute "Cage the Songbird"), heartbreak (Amos' "Hey Jupiter" and "Doughnut Song"), and suicide (John's "Someone's Final Song" and Amos' "Marianne"). While Lambert does provide some light in terms of arrangements and subtle shifts in tempo – with songs such as "Write You a Song" and "Steady and Sure" – the album retains a starkness that suggests this is a collection to experience from start to finish.

Lambert's lyrics take an unflinching look at depression and anxiety, and her candor is admirable and often uncomfortable. The brief album opener "Fine, Finally" sets the tone of a woman in a boat seeing her reflection in the water and thinking "shit, she looks happy for a girl who is drowning." When Lambert utters "I'm fine, I'm finally done," the impact is ominous. Who is fine? The survivor in the boat, or the drowning girl? And what exactly does it mean for either to be "finally done"? From here, the sixteen tracks are almost relentless in their examinations of what it means to be stuck in one's own head all the time – best encapsulated in the spoken word of "Me, Museum."

"Shame" suggests Ophelia's syndrome, with references to memory loss (or in the context of this album, the ways depression can hinder our ability to focus) and, more specifically, the ways in which self-harm allows us to feel like we're taking control. "You can't break me... you can't shame me if I've already done it myself," Lambert intones. Songs such as "House of Mirrors" and "Not Ready to Die Yet" examine isolation and stasis – "locking all of the windows in a house full of mirrors, it's me against me" in the former and, in the latter, "all of my life I've been awake but not here... slept through Christmas and all of the parties."

"Climbing Out" and "Feel With Me" implore us to take in the moment and just feel, no matter how fleeting a good feeling might be. "Born Sad," one of the album's few up-tempo moments, posits that maybe some of us are predisposed to sorrowful perspectives – and, furthermore, that that might be okay!.

And where "Write You a Song" and "Steady and Sure" express the power of, and gratitude for, new love, "Easy to Leave" and "Knife" are despairing in their quest to understand alienation. The plaintive "will anybody stay for me?" (in "Easy to Leave") leads to a more specific attempt to grasp, in "Knife," why "you were there, and then you were not." The only conclusion reached is that "I'm not bad just because you left me," and yet "not good just because you loved me."

Toward the end come two of the album's most stark moments, both of which are primarily spoken word pieces. Over the top of a string quartet in "Trauma is a Stalker," Lambert articulate a pointed frustration, and even anger, with the flippant way in which depression is still too often discussed: "Don't look at me like that, like I can do better, like this sadness is a well that I jumped into on purpose." The unsettling "Another Rape Poem" recalls being 16 and having "a boyfriend that was an idiot." Unbeknownst to her boyfriend, she sneaks off with a friend "into an Army barracks late at night, she was dating an older guy who lived on the base." The protagonist recalls her rape, having made excuses for the perpetrator – "I drank too much... I cheated [on my boyfriend]... 'boys will be boys'" and characterizing it as "rough sex" to avoid the admission that she had, in fact, been sexually assaulted. Her recollections come while washing a coffee mug, wishing her hands were instead wrapped "around his neck and I say 'no' a whole fuck ton louder than I did" that night. To compare Lambert's song with Amos' equally as harrowing "Me and a Gun" (from her iconoclastic "Little Earthquakes" album in 1991) might appear too easy, but the sheer impact of both songs is unparalleled.

What makes "Grief Creature" such a difficult, but ultimately rewarding, listen is that its overall mood is so consistent. Aside from the themes as detailed above, the musical backdrops are largely slower to mid-tempo. Colorful arrangements emerge in tracks like "Born Sad," its infectious pop setting juxtaposing a poignant lyric, and the alt-rock tinged regret in "If You Ever Leave Somebody." The Kate Bush-style synths and multi-tracked vocals of "Feel With Me" are refreshing, lending the album one of its more divergent arrangements. The only other issue is that the few humorous moments (not "ha-ha!" humor but rather in spirit and tone) – "started praying that Oprah would save us all" (in "Me, Museum") and "you asked me if I had TSA Precheck" (in "Steady and Sure"), as well as the self-deprecation in "Write You a Song" – pass quickly before the sentiment registers. As a consequence, and by Lambert's own admission, the album is a heavy listen.

That said, over the course of its seventeen songs, what "Grief Creature" does best is articulate the relentlessness of depression and anxiety. As Lambert sings in "Not Ready to Die Yet," "the shame is gigantic, sits loud in my eardrum... a marathon of hurt, can I just fucking live?... I still believe in hope but the voices are loud tonight."

Mary Lambert
"Grief Creature"
$9.99 (digital), $10.99 (CD) and $25.99 (vinyl)
http://marylambertsings.com