ALBUM REVIEW: An Overview on Phenomenal Nature – Cassandra Jenkins
An Overview on Phenomenal Nature - Cassandra Jenkins
As winter waned two years ago, land and man defrosted together. The end of isolation drew near, and hope was finally on the horizon. It was in this precise moment that one album passed through the ether like a gust of wind, soft-spoken and inconspicuous. It was overlooked by most, except those who spotted a glimmer in the breeze.
Cassandra Jenkins’ An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, released on February 19, 2021, didn’t make many headlines. If it weren’t for a stray critical nod from Pitchfork, the understated seven-song project likely would’ve never found an audience outside the singer-songwriter’s previous base. Straddling folk, jazz, and indie rock, Overview unfurls with the elegance and delicacy of a falling feather.
Overview settled into my library like an old book of poetry with frayed edges and dog-eared corners. Its wisdom was apparent to me from the start, but impossible to unpack immediately. Rather, I’ve unshelved it again every couple of months, carefully blowing off the dust and allowing it to teach me something new each time.
There is a matter-of-factness to Jenkins’ lyricism as striking as its emotional potency: “I’m a three-legged dog working with what I’ve got,” she sings on “Michelangelo,” hobbling onto the album’s opener with puppy dog eyes and a pitiful shrug.
Rather than indifference, though, Jenkins’ proclamation projects acceptance. Her circumstances simply are: triumph and grief washes over Jenkins with equal intensity, leaving her on the shore to pick up the pieces and move forward.
Overcoming grief is a central theme on Overview, most forcefully in standout tracks “New Bikini” and “Ambiguous Norway.” Both songs were inspired by the death of David Bergman — lead singer of now-disbanded indie rock outfit Purple Mountains — who Jenkins was set to tour with before the sudden tragedy.
The former is a memory montage, rotating its cast of characters across four verses while keeping an unwavering thesis. In the aching aftermath of painful events, Jenkins consults a fisherman, her friends, and her mother, who all offer her the same advice: “Baby, go to the ocean / The water, it cures everything.”
If “New Bikini” is an anthem for healing, “Ambiguous Norway” is one for falling apart. “No matter where I go, you’re gone, you’re everywhere,” Jenkins sings, backed by a lush and melancholy arrangement. With grief, the only way out is through.
As is most apparent on “Hard Drive,” the album’s epic and episodic spoken-word centerpiece, Overview is a long exhale, a collection of journal entries that spills out with honesty and grace. Jenkins is a historian, acutely tuned in to the world around her and trying to pull it together.
At the beginning of “Crosshairs,” Jenkins delivers another devastating one-liner. “All I want is to fall apart in the arms of someone entirely strange to me,” she sings. When she released Overview, she did exactly this.
Jenkins has fallen apart in my arms over and over, every time I press play on this exquisite record. Inspired by her vulnerability, I’ve fallen apart right back.
- DJ Danny Darko AKA Fitz Cain
RIYL: Big Thief, Faye Webster, Phoebe Bridgers
Recommended tracks: “New Bikini,” “Hard Drive,” “Ambiguous Norway”
FCC: Clean