Cameron Mesirow—better known as art pop auteur Glasser—has always done it herself. Ring, her 2010 debut, was entirely made with Garageband. Its follow-up, 2013’s Interiors, traded colorful ridges for sleek contemporary avant-garde pop yet retained an independent spirit. A decade later, for her third studio album, Mesirow has pivoted to something more complex and idiosyncratic. If Interiors looked to the future and Ring faced the past, crux is nestled in a baroque, nearly-medieval period—a sort of in-between-ness of things, befitting for the album’s narrative of life after the death of a close friend. Falling back on her Celtic and Scottish roots, Mesirow crafts a lightly fanciful yet deeply felt elegy, using subtle flourishes to consider the meaning of death and what comes after.
In the olden days, a poet typically called upon a muse in the first few lines of a poem. Here, Mesirow echoes this technique with the opening song, “A Guide.” It’s a kind of invocation that fits neatly within the Vangelis-chic of the Weeknd’s After Hours, with neon-lit synths simmering in the wet dark and digitally androgynous backing vocals. On “Design,” from her last record, Mesirow wondered if there was a God. On crux, she seems to have surrendered if not to a specific deity then at least to a higher power—hope for the afterlife, perhaps.
Undergirding Mesirow’s spirituality is the physical desire that runs through all her work. “As far as I’m concerned, all my records are horny records,” Mesirow said in a recent interview with Vogue. Describing him simply as her “first love” in the same interview, Mesirow lets the music tell us all we need to know about her relationship with the man she lost to an accidental overdose. crux lovingly addresses that absence. “Knave” and “Thick Waltz” turn with nonverbal and primordial feeling, reaching for something folkloric but also instinctual with slide guitar and alto sax, respectively. On “Clipt,” Mesirow centers her Celtic ancestry, leaving room for a sprightly violin breakdown in the song’s second half. “Drift” balances a buoyant beat and strings with existential musings. “What a good life/except for all those times/when you want to die,” Mesirow sings.
If you’ll forgive a few lapses into the maudlin, where her songwriting lacks the words for grief’s indeterminable emotions, crux becomes a vibrant and altogether moving record. It relinquishes old frameworks for a deeper, more complicated approach to music than anything in Mesirow’s discography. It doesn’t just fill an empty space, it takes the shape of the void.
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