Retired from Sad, New Career in Business Review

This is the companion piece to Lush and it is a harder object. The strings are more dissonant, the piano is struck rather than played, and the singing has picked up an edge that the first record kept smoothing away. Goodbye, My Danish Sweetheart opens with an ascending piano figure and a lyric about wanting to be taken care of that is direct in a way nothing on the previous album managed. Class of 2013 is two minutes of a young woman asking her mother if she can come home, sung almost without accompaniment, and it is the most affecting thing on either of the school records.

Strawberry Blond is the one that grew a large second life on its own. The rest still suffers from the same problems: the arrangements are exercises, the production has no weight in the low end, and the whole thing is more admirable than enjoyable. She would leave this style entirely within a year, and the departure was the right call.