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LP
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BING 206LP
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"Asher White's third album in two years (and fifteenth overall), Home Constellation Study is less a refinement of 2023's sly, quaint New Excellent Woman, and more an explosion of it. Her meticulous chamber pop has given way to resplendent swells of horns and squeals of noise, throbbing bass and queasy orchestral loops. The cover, painted by White, frames a burst of flowers against a dark blue abyss, mimicking the music: over-frenzied sambas, bleary slacker rock, hushed ambient meditations, and surprisingly slick disco, White mines her personal minutiae for tokens of political decay, alienation, and religious rapture. 2024 has found the prolific Providence-based singer-songwriter ascending through her city's fertile experimental rock scene alongside the breakout synth-punk act babybaby explores and her labelmates Or Best Offer. Live, White's band plays riotous, unpredictable noise rock that nods to their city's storied DIY scene; on Home Constellation Study, mid-album highlights like 'Downstate Prairie' and 'Hymn' nod to Providence's bands of yore with their blistering sheets of feedback and pummeling drums, placing White, improbably, within the lineage of local heroes Les Savy Fav or the broken pop dispatches of Black Pus. At its core, however, Home Constellation Study is the product of studied, monastic auteurism. Like New Excellent Woman, it was arranged, performed, recorded and mixed by White alone in her basement studio in Providence. 'Happy Birthday' is an earnest psalm, a paean of devotion and remorse to God a la Beverly Glenn-Copeland that drifts along with Panda Bear haziness. White's concept of 'toxic femininity' undergoes further investigation on 'Good Luck!' and 'Runes,' both with Elliott Smith-like chord changes and the barbs of cynical romantics like Aimee Mann. Asher White's vision has never been so expansive and unpredictable."
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LP
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BING 192LP
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"Asher White's music is a complex and heartfelt reaction to the churn of the modern world. With tender intimacy and resounding anxiety, White takes a wide view through the lens of her own queer sexual politics and transgender identity; what does it mean to renew, to progress, to transform? What is lost, gained, or irreversibly altered? At 22 years old, White has developed a massive self-released discography: over a dozen albums since 2015, each one started the moment the last one was finished. New Excellent Woman is a distillation of these experiments and discoveries, a new achievement in songwriting that stands astride the cracks in the earth and lopsided ground. Songs jump between styles like a pubescent sex drive, all locked together by White's ability to pull melody out of chaos. New Excellent Woman wanders a meticulous cut-and-pasted path paved by forebears like The Books and Animal Collective. It sounds like a live band, bursting with kinetic energy, but the album was constructed alone in her Providence, RI studio, where she arranged, performed, recorded, and mixed the record herself. The ingenuity of Dirty Projectors is laced with the catchiness and warmth of The Kinks, and maybe a dash of Elephant 6. It's like an ADHD party and the listener is the first to arrive. New Excellent Woman is built from detritus, often quite literally: from the thrift store amplifiers and scavenged keyboards she uses to her penchant for discovering and sampling obscure YouTube videos into her songs. The thick fog of 'Bedsong' is made up of little more than a Hammond organ found on craigslist and a few muffled drums piled with rags; opener 'Ptolemy' uses a seemingly random video of teenage boredom as its textural and rhythmic backdrop. The ceaseless march of the modern world can feel both awe-inspiring and abysmal. New highways and condominiums are erected in a matter of weeks as historic burial grounds are demolished. Even short TikToks seem to expire in real time. Asher White won't change things, but New Excellent Woman gives one a fresh and poignant perspective of the shifting world around through her eyes -- and maybe a connection is the best one can hope for."
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