Don’t ask Faye Webster about her canine. She’s going to solely reveal his breed off the document, and he or she’s suspicious that locals in her city have already realized an excessive amount of. “My neighbors know his identify/Thought that was bizarre however I’m over it,” she sings midway by means of her fifth album, by means of a vocoder’s digital masks. Her protecting impulses prolong past her beloved pet. The Atlanta singer-songwriter finds methods to expertise music away from the general public eye, dropping in unannounced because the bassist for native punks Upchuck and ducking into the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra on the final minute; the latter behavior impressed the title of her newest document. On Underdressed on the Symphony, she incessantly steps again from the mic and permits her band, or often simply silence, to fill within the empty area. It’s a document about hiding—from heartbreak, from fame—that, whether or not by means of vocal processing or omission, fittingly obscures Webster from view.
Webster started constructing a richer sound round her wispy, honeyed vocals on her 2022 EP Automotive Remedy Periods, the place she introduced in a 20-piece orchestra to cowl songs from her earlier two albums. For Webster, the EP was an opportunity to lose herself within the music swirling round her confessional songs: “I might simply neglect lyrics or neglect the place I’m as a result of I used to be listening to [the orchestra] play,” she stated. However the place that album accentuated the ethereal qualities of her songs, Underdressed on the Symphony emphasizes the naturalism of her songwriting, constructing melodies with a grand piano, a drum package, and an electrical guitar.
Gone are the sweeping synths that offered a cushion for her diaristic musing; this time, Webster leans into the acoustic sounds of a freewheeling jam session. Her backing gamers—lots of whom have been performing along with her since her early days—take steps into the foreground. On “Wanna Give up All of the Time,” the place she admits that “it’s the eye that freaks me out,” yawning pedal metal and glowing Fender Rhodes appear to talk in her stead. Right here, as on the equally impressionistic “He Loves Me Yeah!,” she brings in a brand new voice to assist additional obscure her personal: the sound of Wilco’s Nels Cline on the guitar, plucking out elegant solos the place one other verse would possibly in any other case go. “Lifetime” stretches the repetition of a single phrase—“in a lifetime”—into one thing like jazz, Charles Garner’s drumming conserving a unfastened tempo as Nick Rosen’s piano carries the music to its quiet conclusion. As Webster tells it, she didn’t need the music to finish, so she requested Rosen to maintain it going by means of refined chord modifications. The prolonged coda lets her linger within the shadow of his piano just a little longer, an viewers to her personal personal symphony.
