oil by kendall :3

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Crude oil is reflective and shiny. In this sense it acts much like other liquids, bouncing light away from itself. An oil spill, however, occasionally has the ability to create radiant and colorful spectra, like grounded rainbows speckled on the rocks of a beach. With this beauty comes great suffering.

Its presence indicates a disastrous toll on the animal population nearby. If marine populations are not directly taken by an oil spill, they are marred with its toxic properties in the long-term. Otters die of hypothermia, seas are coated in it years after the fact, and entire shellfish populations can plateau. Photographs of oil spills that don’t feature the plight of animals often come off as pretty, betraying their true nature as a suffocating, life-sapping force.

The latest work of Seattle pop polymath kendall :3 presents a similar dichotomy. ‘oil’ is stunning and gorgeous, actively glistening with flanger and glossy vocals. It’s exceptionally bright–very few moments are spent away from her upper vocal range. Many tracks find beauty in slowly evolving an effect-laden choir, such as ‘swallow’ with its synthpop pastiche made into a psychedelic chant or ‘cherry pie’ softly duetting with itself. Yet, despite these glimmering musical features, there are gloomy undertones found just below the surface. Percussive samples glitch and pound with the impunity of an all-consuming army, and lyrics profoundly focus on deep-seeded regrets and neurosis. Poetic musings on the totality of life under duress carry much of the album’s thematic text, overwhelmed with the capacity of life to throw everything at you and concerned with the interpersonal dynamics that drive that sense of being unable to breathe. Being asphyxiated by the pressures of humanity is common with ‘oil’.

Paired with this looming human plague of emotionality is a new presence, masqueraded under the veil of a tar-soaked ocean. Where ‘dirt’ was the exploration of a character attempting to come into existence through all the flora and fauna around them, ‘oil’’s primary voice is that of a hermit creature in desperate times. Each song is a vignette overflowing with the character’s introspection, sometimes transforming into something more “human” in direct defiance of those who wish to leash them down (‘swallow’, ‘writhe’, among others). In other moments, it is passionately love-struck in this limbo between humanity and inhumanity set atop soft synths and crooning vocal performances (‘lighthouse’, ‘cherry pie’). The theatrical backdrop and the spacious mix contribute to giving a heft, making ‘oil’ operatic in the greatest senses of the term. The eclecticism of its instrumentation contributes to its world feeling properly lived in and its experiences real, even as they’re fictionalized and drenched in poetry.

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