(Dead Oceans)The LA songsmith’s second album doesn’t disappoint
‘The doctor put her hands over my liver,” sings Phoebe Bridgers on Garden Song. “She told me my resentment’s getting smaller.” Arresting lyrics such as these have catapulted this 25-year-old LA singer-songwriter to the forefront of a wave of millennial songsmiths, informed in part by Laurel Canyon, in part by indie rock and – especially for Bridgers – the whispered urgency of the late Elliott Smith.
Bridgers’s second album under her own name, Punisher moves forward confidently from her 2017 debut, Stranger in the Alps – an accomplished set that, in part, digested her vexed relationship with the disgraced Americana artist Ryan Adams. Across Punisher’s 11 tracks, matters of the heart recur – the none-more-90s cut I See You discusses Bridgers’s feelings for her drummer ex – but her deceptively lovely treatments range widely, taking in the disappointments of touring on Kyoto and I Know the End, or saltines and serotonin on Graceland Too. The excellent
Halloween channels Smith most audibly, but the song’s gently plucked meditations and quavery anomie are all Bridgers’s own.