Alice Phoebe Lou – ‘Glow’
The new album plays it safe but provides everything promised.
★★★★☆
After a busy few years since she released her debut album Orbit in 2016, Alice Phoebe Lou hasn’t seemed to slow down since. With 2020’s single Witches (possibly her best song ever), she’d been teasing a new sound that is a move away from the first album she paved her way with.
Being the queen of melancholic neo-folk, Glow had to deliver something fresh and exciting that we were yet to see from her.
Photo: Caroline Mackintosh
Starting off the album with pensive Only When I, Alice offers her angelic vocals accompanied by a similarly ethereal instrumental, keeping it simple—Alice is a singer who doesn’t need the whole orchestra to boost a voice that could easily hold it’s own by itself. The titular track, Glow, serves up something completely different, with fuzzy guitar and an experimental tone. Dusk, an ode to a lover, says it all with lyrics divulging a girl who “smiles and everything will be alright”.
Although fairly new to the whole love-song schtick (“I used to avoid love songs thinking the subject matter too overdone or trivial”), Dusk seems far from your typical heart-on-sleeve ballad—it’s an archaic song that is deeply personal and yet so profoundly open.
Mother’s Eyes shares a sound with fellow soulful singer Angel Olsen, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear it on one of her earlier albums. On Mother’s Eyes, Alice Phoebe Lou flexes her vocal capabilities and her love for funky, soul-baring folk music. It’s evident to see the transcendent jump from 2019’s Paper Castles to the softer tones of today’s offering Glow: an album that feels like a trip to the spa—if you close your eyes and put a fancy facemask on, you’ll be halfway there.
How to Get Out of Love and Heavy // Light as Air are equally as charming and mesmerising as the other, complementing each other as the album slowly begins to reveal itself as the Valentines-gift-that-arrived-a-month-late.
On Dirty Mouth, a track that was released beforehand as a single, she declares her impressive self-awareness with “I’ve got baggage / It’s got big wheels”. Being as vulnerable as possible while facing a new lover—and how vulnerable can you get than baring your soul to the public?
Lonely Crowd is an intoxicating and repetitive gift to the ears, with Alice singing “tell the fishes I said hello / I’ll make some wishes and burn them in the snow,” proving that, not only is she incredibly skilled on guitar, but her song-writing also isn’t half-bad either.
Next is the vintage-feel of Lover / / Over the Moon, which sounds as if she’d somehow managed to record it and pop it in one of those jewellery boxes that play a song once you wind up the back. Impressive, to say the least. With all the crackly goodness of an old 60s record, there’s a charm to this song that is begging for it to be played on a vintage turntable.
Drawing nearer to the end of the album, Driveby is an emotionally-rich track that offers an air of longing, mixed with Phoebe’s notable lyrics and laidback guitar. Penultimately, Velvet Mood encapsulates velvet in every sense of the word; it’s soft, luscious, and tender. A perfectly slow song that drifts into the last one with ease.
The closer of the wonderfully telling album, Lovesick, is exactly that; it doesn’t hold back and certainly makes up for Phoebe’s previous rejection of love songs. With an ebullient and joyous sound accompanying her beautiful voice, she sings the unforgettable lines of “I keep thinking about all the work I have to do / But it all fades away when I think of you.”
It’s safe to say that if you weren’t a fan of hers before, perhaps this love-struck album will change your mind.
