The artist known as Blondshell sounds fired up. Just over a year after releasing her second album, “If You Asked for a Picture”, the LA musician born Sabrina Tietelbaum returns with “Violins” which, contrary to the name, is not some sudden pivot to classical swells of strings. Instead, it’s a fully-fledged rock record, where her formerly plain-speaking lyricism has evolved into something considerably more abstract – while still leaning on her favoured, reverb-drenched Nineties alt-rock sound.
The 11-track “Violins” trades the veil of bad romantic relationships for something braver, asking how we balance the world’s violence with its beauty across songs about troubled friendships, religion, the body, and the long, unglamorous work of healing. It’s an album of grandeur, drama, and tragedy, built on virtuoso hooks, swelling guitars, and big lead lines, pulling in fresh touchstones from Gang of Four, Teenage Fanclub, The Go-Betweens, and Sade, alongside lyrical nods to Leonard Cohen and Pavement.
Album standout “Heart Has to Work Out” is led by an angular riff, stomping drums and electric guitar squalls that hang broodily over the track like thunderclouds. It’s a bloody, unsparing dissection of the complexities of female friendship: the rivalry, the tension, the unspoken feelings. “You give me paws, you get me scaring strangers,” Teitelbaum sings, “You got me criticising, you make this feel like labour.”
Her laconic delivery pairs beautifully with poetic songwriting that springs forth with striking imagery: “Hands are fireproof, wooden table/ Literary heroine breaking through a stable,” she sings over the thrashy loud-quiet-loud dynamic of closer “Für Elise”. Violent undercurrents churn through songs like “Stone Fruit”, capturing a love so fierce it feels like something darker: “I care to stick to you like a clot/ Wanna hear your history until you don’t wanna talk.”
She’s strangely tender on “New Age Trojan Horse”, an anthemic, Eighties-leaning track that John Cusack might have played from his boombox. As the title suggests, though, its theme creeps up on you, excoriating performative male behaviour that masks misogynist tendencies. Tietelbaum namechecks Leonard Cohen’s posthumous collection of poetry and non-fiction writings, The Flame, on the slow-burning “Sea Legs”. Like Cohen’s work, “Violins” weaves together questions of melancholy, humour, romance and life’s meaning. It pulls you in, beautifully.
