Acquainted with Night

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Virginia-bred, Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter Lael Neale struggled for a long time with how to present her music. A talented vocalist who wrote beautifully melancholic songs, Neale's sound in the early days of her career fell into an neatly produced if somewhat by-the-numbers indie country style. Her 2015 debut I'll Be Your Man was caught between country-folk twang and a nondescript indie sadness, but never pushed completely in either direction. She would complete full albums only to shelve them, feeling that the songs were weighted down by sterile arrangements and superfluous instrumentation. Around 2019, she began experimenting with an Omnichord, an inexpensive and toylike synth instrument. Recording at home on the Omnichord into a cassette four-track, Neale began to feel her songs click as she stripped them down to their rawest elements. Those experiments grew into the lo-fi beauty of second album Acquainted with Night, reaching an even less polished form when Neale began implementing another limitation whereby she only used the first takes of her recordings rather than belaboring the performances in search of perfection.
Light years away from the studio sheen of her debut, Acquainted with Night is a beautifully blemished album, every song bathed in tape hiss and pushing Neale's bruised songwriting into the forefront. "Blue Vein" is one of the few songs that includes guitar, with wistful vocal melodies flying atop understated strums and a bedding of tinny Omnichord swells. Tracks like "For No One for Now" and the observational pop of album highlight "Every Star Shivers in the Dark" incorporate rigid drum machine rhythms. Neale's sweet vocals and heavyhearted lyrics join with the cosmic-but-plastic sounds of the Omnichord and rusty four-track production for an otherworldly sound that drives home the loneliness and longing at the core of the songs. "Sliding Doors & Warm Summer Roses" leans a little more experimental, with dissonant flute-like tones and eerie acid folk melodies wandering through an amorphous arrangement. The multi-tracked vocals on "Let Me Live by the Side of the Road" feel adventurous and ungrounded as well, evening out the more traditional confessional pop moments. In some ways, Acquainted with Night feels like a distant cousin to Adrianne Lenker's songs and instrumentals. Though Neale's album is spacier and less organically drawn, both see talented songwriters turning to more spartan means to deliver the emotional essences of their songs. For Neale, the grainy imperfections and surreal experiments of Acquainted with Night open her songs up to an unforeseen world of solitary beauty and personality, where the clean, professional sound of earlier work rendered them a little bit anonymous.

© Fred Thomas /TiVo