Altar

Album review

While Jo Schornikow's first album was a quiet, almost reverent affair, the Nashville-by-way-of-Melbourne singer-songwriter's follow-up crackles with life—and the fear and shocks that make you feel alive. "I wasn't thinking right" she announces before "Lose Yr Love" kicks in, so catchy and happy and bouncy even though it's a song of abject horror. "It started as a permanent reminder to myself, of a time I almost lost my son to a lake here in Tennessee. It became a kind of meditation on how quietly things can change, and how catastrophic quietness can be. Drowning is a very quiet thing," she has said. "So, to counter that scary sort of quietness, and maybe in attempts to atone for that afternoon where I accidentally but monumentally fucked up, I turned it into a loud, fun sounding song." The title track, meanwhile, sounds like there's a live wire hissing in the background, even as the pretty keys keep the wildness from veering off track. After starting out as a church organist during her teenage years, Schornikow has played keyboards with Phosphorescent, her husband Matthew Houck's musical alter ego, for years, and she is an underrated beast (in the best way) on the instrument. "Spiders" is sonic drama, the piano pulling ear-bending, shape-shifting maneuvers. There's a keen echo of Rosanne Cash's excellent '80s country pop, as well as the bewitched music of modern Highwoman Amanda Shires, in Schornikow's songs. You can feel it on "Lose Yr Love," "Visions" and "Comeback," a track that is at once hushed and low, but also quietly energetic. The singer performs fascinating tricks with her raspy voice—its native Australian accent shyly flashing bright now and again—on that song, making it waver like reflections on water. For the pleasingly Flying Burrito-mellow "Semper Tigris" (Latin for "always a tiger"), she dips and swoops to reach surprising notes. She also comes right in and declares, "I was wrong about you," her voice diving low on those last two words like she's shamefully underlining them, on the terrific "Wrong About You." (The swirly organ of that number is such a soulful embrace it raises the question: As good as the other songs here are, what if she made a whole album of this?) "Patient" nods to Lana del Rey, who Schornikow has accompanied, with its spaced-out—in every meaning—2/4 beat; the whole thing floats off at the end into an ethereal cloud. And "Plaster," Schornikow's love song about being lured by the siren call of a foreign land, evokes the beautiful, twinkling footlights of '70s country folk. "I left Australia because I wanted to be something different. America is, in my opinion, the weirdest country in the world. For better and worse, it has endless patience for reinvention, with celebrating you for whoever you are or want to be," she has said. "Also, any country that produces a Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Ella Fitzgerald or Fiona Apple is the place for me." © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz