cacophany

I am postively fascinated by one of the lines in the Pitchfork review of Paris Paloma's new album, cacophany:

...add an album structure loosely inspired by the hero’s journey, and Cacophony sounds too ambitious to pull off.

I had to know if this was a reading that the reviewer, Hannah Jocelyn, had come up with on her own or whether it was based on something Paloma had said. Apparently it was the latter, as I fount this quote in a Paper magazine article about Paloma (emphasis mine):

Listeners of Cacophony will be able to hear the stories behind Paloma's first two years of adulthood; right before she got "out of the woods," she tells me of some things she was working through regarding her life and mental health. "It's not linear," she adds. "It's going to continue going and there will be new difficulties, I'm sure. But this is a story about my mental growth and working through things that happened in my teens and young adulthood and the grief and pain and immense self-questioning that we start with. It kind of follows the hero's journey and reaches a place of hope, acceptance, and warmth at the end."

The fact that this album was designed with some sort of structure in mind was really interesting to me, because unlike Jocelyn, my biggest problem with cacophany was that it didn't feel cohesive enough.

Take the theme. Paloma is clearly interested in the social aspects of womanhood, in terms of the relationships between women (e.g. in "knitting song") and also misogyny (e.g. in Paloma's breakout single, "labour") and, occasionally, both at the same time (e.g. in "as good a reason"). But cacophany is not a concept album: there are, instead a set of three songs ("triassic love song", "escape pod", and "last woman on earth") in the middle of the album (tracks 10–12 of 15) that are about the apocalypse in various forms.^[1] If it were only "last woman on earth", which is pretty explicitly about bodily autonomy (...in the context of the apocalypse), it might make some sense, but "escape pod" especially really doesn't do anything on the theme, which is jarring when so much of the album is so clearly concerned with an (honestly, rather binary)^[2] exploration of gender.

Let me be clear: there are a number of very good songs on this album. Much as I wish it were on some other album, I quite like "escape pod", and "hunter" is the sort of song that I could imagine launching a thousand fanvids and fic titles in all lower case (with parentheses). In the end, though, this album is exactly the sort I talked about in my Sugar Water review: fifteen discrete good songs, rather than one good album. That's certainly not nothing, but it's not really what I'm looking for.