When
Indigo Sparke made her full-length recording debut, it was with the delicate and graceful
echo, a sparsely arranged set of poignant indie folk songs produced by
Big Thief's
Adrianne Lenker and marked by a brittleness not dissimilar to the latter's own solo material. For the follow-up,
Sparke instead enlisted
the National's
Aaron Dessner to produce. Taking that into account along with its capitalized title, the resulting sophomore album,
Hysteria, takes a predictably more expansive as well as assertive approach to 14 songs still nonetheless rooted in a haunted, meditative folk-rock. The album begins with double-tracked vocals and an amplified guitar on "Blue." The only track here to cross the five-minute mark, it's a rambling, circular ode on loss that ends with a series of howls. Already heavier sounding that the debut, more fleshed-out arrangements soon arrive on "Pressure in My Chest," with its gentle layers of strummed guitar, harmonics, atmospheric keyboards, a simple rhythm section, and, at least on the chorus, harmonized and unison vocal tracks. Later, the animated folk of "Why Do You Lie?" creates a web of fingerstyle guitar and various keyboard timbres over its shuffling drums, and songs including "God Is a Woman's Name," the repetition-fueled "Infinity Honey," and feedback-kissed "Set Your Fire on Me" open up into outright indie rockers -- if restrained, thoughtful ones. Meanwhile, songs including the shimmery, countrified "Sad Is Love" and wailing "Hold On" occupy a space somewhere in between these selections and the album's more folk-oriented balladry, although
Hysteria is backloaded with full-band tracks that almost seem to pick up baggage as the album progresses. One of those entries, "Burn," closes the record with the oft-repeated "Don't want to talk about it" to wrap up nearly an hour of trying to work through it. ~ Marcy Donelson