At the heart of Julia Holter’s pristine chamber pop there exist a felt wisdom and a profound poise. Like a deep breath on a subway car, or a private meditation amid a bustling city street, her songs exude an elegant calm, but they do not often stay still. They dramatize; they swarm. Her work frequently references and even quotes such writers as the Greek playwright Euripides, the French novelist Colette, and the poet Frank O’Hara, but never at the expense of her own composed voice. Classicism and chaos rarely glide together as easefully, or as eloquently, as in a Julia Holter song. “Try to make yourself a work of art,” she sang in bold, augmented measures on her 2011 debut, Tragedy, and there was an innate humanity in that “try.” Holter’s music ushers us along.
Holter’s new album, Aviary, is an odyssey stretching, sky-like, across 90 glorious minutes. She says the title came from a line in a book by the Lebanese-American writer Etel Adnan—“I found myself in an aviary full of shrieking birds”—and is meant to evoke the way memories, beautiful and horrifying, fly around in our minds, echoing the grating noise of the world. That sense of muchness makes for the purest and most daring realization of Holter’s experimental tendencies yet. In the wake of her enchanting trio of singer-songwriter LPs—2012’s Ekstasis, 2013’s Loud City Song, and 2015’s Have You in My Wilderness—this feels like gleeful anarchy. Evoking Holter’s live performances, her seriously locked-in ensemble brings an improvisatory energy to Aviary, weaving together strings, trumpet, and the fantastic drone of bagpipes. The whole album seems to vibrate.
If Holter’s preceding records were novellas, Aviary feels more like a meticulously organized compilation of mind-altering field notes in which a single page can be a world, and its depth is stunning. Songs seem to exist within other songs. Exploring the album feels like walking through a house, where each of its 15 tracks is a room, a repository for another brilliant idea: medieval polyphony, Tibetan Buddhist chanting, the poet Sappho, Dante’s Inferno, even the outer limits of new wave. Each Aviary track is an extreme and immersive sensory experience. “Chaitius” could soundtrack a ballet; “Everyday Is an Emergency” sounds trapped inside a haunted mansion. Holter is often in conversation with ancient realms, and she sings words like “bubonic,” “hysteria,” and “stunning architecture” with disarming ease. (She recently expressed an interest in “the way monks would make art.”) These eccentricities are thrilling to move between. Aviary ultimately has the effect of looking through a new friend’s bookshelf, accessing the wild particularities of their mind.
