Lael Neale
Altogether Stranger

And finally:

to see what I see,

to feel what I feel,

to think what I think,

to imagine what I imagine,

to want what I want.

Why not immerse myself in the new album by Lael Neale, which begins like the old one? The third Sub Pop?

I just heard it. The girl from the small Virginia farm and Los Angeles is back. She with her: Lael. All "alone" (with Guy Blackeslee): with herself, in herself. All here, now: deep sapphire blue. This is her period.

An album without the need to be one. Like all those today, but a little more. A collection of fragile and evocative songs. Indie-low fi and pop-rock, almost no folk: like imagining traveling a road, staying still at the corners. Peering at each other; a pair of hesitant loners who don't set out. Doubled in their solitude. Doubly alone in their distance. Here: doubly solitary songs. Two points of view in each track. Both partial. There is no disappointment, no joy, no balance, no passivity. There is a latent tension. It might be that you are focused on a moment in your life and from there, everything is possible, then everything is logically impossible. Therefore logic does not work properly. Something else is needed to get out. You don't know what, but you feel there is a sea to dive into and start swimming ("But wasn't it King Hannah's album?" "Yes, but this time it doesn't matter!").

So this collection of fragile and evocative songs, of indie pop-rock, is a step away from freedom. And, as a search for artistic freedom, as the fruit of an existential contraction, it should be appreciated. It is logical that someone else's efforts, for us, count less. For heaven’s sake, it may not be liked. It must not be liked, in a certain sense. But Leal is sincere. That's what gets me, at the moment, with her. And she's captivating. Leal, the forty-four-year-old singer-songwriter who makes indie rock with the omnichord and tapes, the drum machine and the guitar vibrato ("the soup"), in a drizzle and rice cakes style ("the soaked bread"). Both things, because Altogether Stranger is the stranger that each of us is: that each one has outside and inside themselves.

So Lael says, from herself to herself:

I see what I see,

I feel what I feel,

I think what I think,

I imagine what I imagine,

I want what I want.

She is ready to move, but hasn't taken a step yet.

And from the dimly lit corner of the street, like others, she longs in the songs for the purity of a design of freedom.