Nothing's About to Happen to Me Review

The Nashville turn from the previous album goes further here and gets stranger. The band is small and nervy, all thin electric guitar and restless bass, and over it sit orchestral parts that were properly scored and conducted rather than sampled in, and the two layers argue with each other in a way that keeps the whole record alert. The subject is anonymity: a woman who has decided that nothing happening to her is a state worth defending, and the writing treats that as neither tragedy nor triumph.

Where's My Phone? is funnier and more anxious than anything she has released. I'll Change for You is the emotional centre and it is devastating in the way her best writing always is, plain sentence by plain sentence. The reason it lands just short of the top rank is company: this is not a record you put on lightly, and its pleasures are almost entirely in close attention. On those terms it is superb.