Be the Cowboy Review

The formal achievement here is the compression. Fourteen tracks in thirty three minutes, several of them under ninety seconds, each one a fully realised situation with a beginning and an end. Nobody is the single, a disco track about calling out into an empty apartment, and the gap between how cheerful it sounds and what it says is the whole method in miniature. Geyser opens the record with an organ and a held breath.

Old Friend and Come into the Water sketch entire relationships in a verse. Two Slow Dancers closes it with a piano and two people who used to be young, and it may be the finest song she has written. The arrangements are more varied than anything before, moving between country pedal steel, synth pop and bare piano without ever losing the thread. Every line is doing work. It is the record where technique, subject and voice all lock together, and it deserves the reputation it has.