Tirzah - Devotion

August 28, 2018 - Domino

Music about love never gets old. We write about it over and over and over again, and it doesn’t bring us any closer to understanding it. But the activity of seeking to understand the profound complexity of human emotions leaves behind a residue with an iridescent sheen, mesmerizing like a puddle of motor oil on the ground of a parking lot. This is the art we love, we hate, we devour, we regurgitate, we study, all to gain some sense of identity. 

The unbridled honesty of Tirzah’s first album Devotion is a thing of beauty. We have been waiting for this album to drop for years, and it was well worth the wait. Tirzah and Micachu, longtime friend and collaborator and the album’s producer, did not rush through the craft or bend to the pressures of the market. These are songs that have been slowly cooking for a long time. They are informal, loose, and they effortlessly share with us an intimate picture of a love life. Not a love life with pulsing one-dimensional cinematic drama, but a story of the casual, everyday dynamics between two lovers. There are ups and downs and impulsivities that are easy to relate to. “I’m only trying to be real, don’t reject the way I feel.” It’s grappling with what it’s like to be a woman in a culture that views your sex as weaker because of emotions, and to be in a love that pours out of you openly anyway, and to be fearlessly accepting of that overflow rather than opposed to it. These are devotionals to the experience of an everyday, modern love story, and it’s a pleasure to melt into the worship space. 

Tirzah’s voice is a sensual whisper with the looseness of a free form jazz crooner. Sounds hum from her lips then weave together and apart, a tapestry magnified by Micachu’s sound engineering. Melodies are cut up and glued back together so artfully that auditory texture becomes a primary expressive force in the songs along with the poetry. The vocals are rarely distorted much, just rearranged playfully like a physical paper collage. And when they are distorted more, it’s as a specific device which pushes the listener away from Tirzah to emphasize the emotional space of the song. In ‘Guilty,’ this device is used to evoke the feeling of isolation highlighted in the subject matter of the lyrics, which sing the conflict and desperation of marginalizing yourself from your loved ones.

I’m impressed that this music sounds so spontaneous because it is heavily produced. There’s spontaneity in the free form singing and also in the production style. The effect for the listener is a feeling of closeness, of being in the room with Tirzah and Micachu during a private home-based recording session followed by a gathering around the dinner table. It is intimate.

There is also a bit of dissonance to the instrumentation on this album that keeps it grounded in physical space. Sometimes the notes are slightly at odds with each other. ‘Basic Need’ is the best example. Parts of the melodies below Tirzah’s voice sound slightly off-key in the way a beloved hand-me-down toy piano does after years of use. It ties us back to the memory of physical space and physical music. The strangeness is relished, not edited out in post-production. 

In ‘Devotion,’ a man’s voice (Coby Sey) is incorporated to sprinkle some contrast but also some comparison. He becomes his own dimension, the voice speaking in the room while Tirzah breaks the fourth wall and sings her internal dialogue to her audience. Coby keeps repeating the same phrase over and over again, “So listen to me.” The texture of his lyrics are an undercurrent essential to the structure of the song. The words he sings deliver a message simultaneously complementary to Tirzah’s lyrics and completely oblivious to the emotional swells of her desires. A person in a room is watching their object of desire talk and secretly luxuriating in that moment. 

My favorite track, ‘Holding On,’ is a wave of sparkling emotions, a celebration of spring, of new beginnings, of a craving for growth and of interest in a new acquaintance. The synthesized organ is cheesy, but so are those feelings of joy and life that skip along to the giddy beat. We still all chase them anyway. Happiness might only paint with white, but white light is the rainbow.

Devotion runs the gamut of love songs, then runs a few steps further into the sublime. For a first album release, it’s a solid platform built at the top of the mountain, and the only direction Tirzah can build is up from here. ☔