For the follow-up to
Place Is, her 2021 full-length debut,
kolezanka's
Kristina Moore rejoined longtime collaborator
Ark Calkins in the studio (in this case, Pulp Arts in Gainesville, Florida) with a batch of songs written during a long winter of pandemic isolation spent in her Brooklyn apartment. The resulting album,
Alone with the Sound the Mind Makes, consists of a surprisingly playful set of 11 tracks that explore memories, streams of consciousness, and dreams as well as the encroaching New York City. Even songs with titles like "Mania" and particularly "City Summer Sweat" are bright and whimsical, with the latter employing a Casio-tone version of a circus calliope, weird, '50s sci-fi-like laser sounds, Polish backing lyrics, and a false ending. Elsewhere, the comical and likewise psychedelic "Eye Contact" approximates a celestial chorus to match the drama of re-emergence, albeit while acknowledging "It's hard to be alive." Things get a little heavier musically on tracks like "Cheers!," a song about enduring trauma, and on the melancholy "A Body," with its Brazil-inflected strumming, although its lilting lyricism, soaring choral vocals, and trilling clarinet keep lyrics about self-consciousness and perception in the realm of the fantastical.
Moore takes on service industry work on "Slapstick," which transitions from programmed drums and tinny keys to live drums and electric guitar ("Is there a right way to smile at all these saccharine platitudes?"). Just as
kolezanka's puckish palette starts to bleed songs into one another, the more earnest "River Rushing," which was inspired by a dream about her childhood home in Arizona, closes the album on a poetic note, with images of a "season-less desert," mountains, stars, and a developing Biblical flood that provides
Alone with the Sound the Mind Makes' one true band jam. ~ Marcy Donelson
