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Jessica Bailiff, "Feels Like Home"
Jessica Bailiff's fourth full length for Kranky is easily her most approachable work to date. Feels Like Home provides all of the familiar elements of Bailiff's unique songwriting, but in easily-digestible three minute slices.
I had expected Feels Like Home to be a much simpler and more stripped-down acoustic affair as it seemed like Bailiff was moving away from the dense layering of her first two records with her last effort. Instead, she's chosen to refine and compact the sound that she explored on Hour of the Trace and Even in Silence, bringing some of the vocals to the foreground while leaving out the epic scale of 7-12 minute songs.
Of course, the drawback to this approach is that the songs that really kick at three or four minutes feel like they could easily go on for twice as long without getting stale. With shorter songs and more up front and transparent production, Bailiff turns her dreamy washes and lyrics into something more closely resembling pop songs, but she keeps convention at bay with a series of false endings and otherworldly transitions that remind me that these aren't songs that have been stamped out of a mold.
The album's second track "We Were Once" is a beautifully clean and to-the-point fairy tale, standing out as what would likely be the album's "single" were Bailiff and Kranky truly aiming for pop glory. Later on, the whispering of Russian voices in that begins in "Cinq" adds a new flavor to Bailiff's work, while "If We Could" is a drone piece that might have worked just as well the basis for an eight minute song as it does a 2:45. "Spiral Dream" gives the album its most dramatic moment when a reverb-drenched piano is suddenly engulfed in a wall of fuzzy bass, guitar, and breathy voices that would make any Spacemen 3 fan blush.
For longtime fans of Bailiff's work, this new approach of making quick points rather than building long growing spaces might be a little bittersweet. The songs here represent some of Bailiff's best, most melodically approachable material ever, but they are also some of her shortest songs! Luckily they work amazingly well in condensed form, but can I really be blamed for wanting more?
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