The first half of the album’s opening track is a beautiful, restrained ballad, which aches with quivering vulnerability. The second half of that same track is a screeching, thumping rock song. And the rest of the album continues in this brilliantly contradictory vein, layering Mitski’s emotive, scale-leaping vocals over squelchy rock riffs and a sea of noise. Its lyrics, too, are astoundingly beautiful.
Mitski’s broad, tremulous vocals and sly humor recall maybe Angel Olsen, while the equal split between unencumbered acoustic pining and pummeling, mid-fi indie rock respectively aligns her with labelmates Frankie Cosmos. And it lays out a compact scene of domestic bliss, littered with specificities—a lover who wears socks in bed, reads Objectivist poetry, and serves as the breeze in her Austin nights. The final acknowledgement of romantic contentment occurs less than three minutes into the album Bury Me at Makeout Creek and by its bitter end, the only thing that can bring Mitski any comfort is the thought of dying with a clean apartment (“They’ll think of me kindly/ When they come for my things”).
The way an outsider might view her narrator is duly noted just by the loaded title of the song “Townie”—this is someone who’s stuck around far too long after the party ended and almost certainly has a distorted perspective as to whether it was any fun to begin with. “Townie” previews a horrible night out with all the protraction and morbid glee of a suicide pact. Her images are startlingly violent—she wants a love that falls like a body from the balcony, she’s holding her breath with a baseball bat and sing-along hooks, Mitski shouts, “I’m not gonna be what my daddy wants me to be…I’m gonna be what my body wants me to be,” a call for freedom that’s galvanizing from a teenage perspective, but increasingly sad as songs like “I Don’t Smoke” and “Drunk Walk Home” lay out the terrible life plan the body of this self-described 25 year-old “tall child” has for her.
Though not necessarily nostalgia, the sound of Bury Me at Makeout Creek is inventive and resourceful in a ’90s-indie way. The choruses here soar like power pop, but are subdued by tempo and fidelity, while cheap drum machines are deployed as much for their tone as their rhythm. And even when Bury Me has full band arrangements, everything calls attention to the narrator’s loneliness—awkwardly thumbed basslines, slapdash drumming, a mocking chorale on “Carry Me Out”, organ drones that could pass for someone nodding off on the keys.
The craft here is obvious, as is the accruing confidence of someone who’s developed a compelling voice in obscurity. Mitski can lay on the emo melodrama (“One word from you/ And I would jump off of this ledge I’m on, baby”) just enough so things aren’t too real and mundane, and while these songs are first-person and personal, they’re meant for an audience.
Mitski Miyawaki is starting to gain a bit of separation from her band; Bury Me at Makeout Creek still sounds like a breakthrough album.
The Fat Angel Sings 