Julia Holter
★★★★
Something In The Room She Moves
DOMINO. CD/DL/LP
Believe and how: first album in six years from experimental singer-songwriter.
THE BEATLES-mangling title of Julia Holter ’s sixth studio album signposts the disorientating space her songs inhabit – almost familiar, yet suffused with dream-like light, logic and language (“What is the opposite love in becoming fish,” she sings on hymn to creation Spinning). The followup to 2018’s diffuse Aviary, Something In The Room She Moves is infor med by the shifts of loss and motherhood as much as Joni Mitchell and Robert Wyatt, stretches of beauty – not least the telekinetic whirl of Sun Girl or Evening Mood’s filtered heartbeat– shadowed by an off-kilter precarity (emphasised by Meyou’s choral wildness). “There’s something in a vacuum/And there’s nothing in the front room,” she sings on the title track, the crispest echo of 2015’s Have You In My Wilderness but an eerie reminder that nothing is ever quite where you left it – especially a songwriter this beautifully elusive.